Not Guilty but Punished Anyway
When Willonte Yates, Malik Perry, Dayonta McClinton, and three other young men arrived at a CVS on College Avenue in Indianapolis on a Tuesday night in October 2015, they were there to rob the pharmacy at gunpoint. It did not go as planned.
McClinton helped guard customers. Yates, who dubbed himself the “mastermind” of a string of similar robberies, led the charge with Perry. But their target, the safe, was equipped with a timed lock, meaning they would not be able to access the drugs inside for several minutes. Each passing moment meant the police could be drawing closer. So the group made off with a small bottle of hydrocodone—a sacrificial offering set aside by the pharmacy for situations like this one—along with kidney medication and cough syrup containing codeine.
A getaway driver brought the group to a residential area. Perry, dismayed at how little they had to show for their efforts, allegedly declined to share the paltry proceeds. He exited the car.
Perry would not get very far. Someone followed him and shot him in the back of the head at close range. It is still unclear who that was.
The government zeroed in on McClinton, who was 17 at the time but was tried as an adult. At his trial in September 2019, prosecution witnesses testified that he and Perry were “like brothers…real close.” The witnesses said McClinton was Perry’s “best friend.” The same could not be said for Yates, the robbery ringleader: His girlfriend was “two-timing” him with Perry, according to testimony from Clevon Williams, who had participated in other robberies with Yates. But Yates, who was cooperating with prosecutors, had implicated McClinton. So had Williams, after spending a year housed in the same detention facility as Yates.
A jury didn’t believe them. It convicted McClinton for his role in the armed robbery but found him not guilty of killing Perry.
Then a judge sentenced McClinton for the murder anyway.
“The driving force in this sentence is not what he’s been convicted of, actually,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt said during McClinton’s sentencing at the federal courthouse in Indianapolis. The main factor in McClinton’s punishment, she said, was Perry’s murder, even though a jury had explicitly considered and rejected the charge that McClinton had caused Perry’s death.Based on his convictions alone, federal sentencing guidelines would recommend that Pratt give McClinton a prison sentence of somewhere from 57 to 71 months, or about five to six years. Instead she sentenced him to 19 years.
That result likely offends most people’s understanding of how the U.S. criminal justice system is supposed to operate. When a defendant hears “not guilty,” he can expect to avoid punishment for that offense, or so we’re told. But the reality is that criminal defendants can be sentenced based on “acquitted conduct,” meaning charges that a jury rejected.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court approved acquitted-conduct sentencing in 1997, it has flown almost entirely under the public’s radar. But in April 2024, amid pressure from various lawyers, judges, and advocates, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the judicial-branch agency that writes the federal sentencing guidelines, unanimously voted to limit the practice. It remains to be seen how much effect that decision will have.
A cohort of left-leaning legal scholars, constitutional conservatives, and libertarian think-tankers is watching. In a time when political tribalism defines many aspects of American life, that transpartisan alliance has at least one thing in common: a desire to eliminate outcomes like the one Pratt imposed on McClinton, who was partially vindicated at trial but punished as if he had been convicted on all counts.
‘Facts That the Jury Necessarily Rejected’
State and federal judges have sentenced defendants based on acquitted conduct for many decades. But the Supreme Court’s blessing of that practice can be traced to half a kilogram of crack cocaine that Sacramento police found in a kitchen cabinet and two guns they discovered in a bedroom closet.
Vernon L. Watts admitted the drugs and guns were his. In December 1993, he was convicted of possessing crack with the intent to distribute it. The jury did not agree beyond a reasonable doubt, however, that he had used a firearm in furtherance of that offense. The federal judge who sentenced Watts nevertheless took the gun charge into account when he imposed a prison term of 262 months, or nearly 22 years, which was significantly longer than the sentence he probably would have received for the crack offense alone.
Watts appealed that sentence—and won. “A district court sentencing a criminal defendant for the offense of conviction cannot reconsider facts that the jury necessarily rejected by its acquittal of the defendant on another count,” said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The court ordered that Watts be resentenced.
About five months later, the same court heard a similar appeal. A federal jury in Honolulu had convicted Cheryl Ann Putra of selling an ounce of cocaine but acquitted her of another drug sale, which the government alleged had taken place the next day. Again, the judge sentenced her as if she had been found guilty of everything. Again, the 9th Circuit reversed.
Both cases attracted the Supreme Court’s attention. On January 6, 1997, without hearing oral arguments, the Court published its 7–2 decision in United States v. Watts, reversing the 9th Circuit’s rulings and officially greenlighting what some judges had long been doing. When sentencing defendants, the majority said, the government need not be deterred by an acquittal if the defendant received a split verdict—i.e., if he was convict
Article from Reason.com
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