United States v. Kenneth Barbee, Jr., No. 21-2413 (8th Cir. 2022)
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A jury convicted Defendant of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Defendant challenged the admission of his prior felony firearm conviction under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b). He also appealed the procedural and substantive reasonableness of his sentence.
The Eighth Circuit affirmed. Defendant first challenged the admission of his 2008 conviction as improper propensity evidence. The court explained that even assuming for the sake of argument that evidence of the prior crime was inadmissible, any error was harmless. The Government asked the witness only two vague questions about the prior conviction and mentioned it in passing during the closing argument. The district court gave a limiting instruction when the evidence was introduced, telling the jury that it could only be used to show knowledge, intent, or absence of mistake, and not as evidence of guilt. The prosecutor repeated the limiting guidance in her closing argument. And the jury had ample evidence to support its verdict even without the evidence—including a recording from the post-arrest interview in which Defendant admitted that he handled the guns.
Defendant further argued that hat the district court did not give enough consideration to Section 3553(a) factors when deciding his sentence. The court explained that based on the record as a whole, particularly the court’s engagement with each side’s arguments at sentencing, the court is satisfied that the district court was aware of and adequately considered the Section 3553(a) factors. Finally, in considering that a within-Guidelines sentence is presumptively reasonable, the court held that Defendant failed to overcome this presumption of reasonableness.
Court Description: [Kobes, Author, with Loken and Kelly, Circuit Judges] Criminal case - Criminal law and Sentencing. In this prosecution for being a felon in possession, even if the district court erred under Rule 404(b) in admitting evidence of defendant' prior felony firearm conviction, the error was harmless in light of the limiting instruction which was given, the minor part the evidence played in the government's case and closing, and the ample evidence of defendant's guilt; the district court adequately weighed the 3553(a) factors and explained its sentencing decision; defendant's within-guideline-range sentence was not substantively unreasonable
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