UNITED STATES оf America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Sean D. PATRICK, Defendant-Appellant.
No. 12-1789.
United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.
Argued Oct. 24, 2012. Decided Feb. 14, 2013.
707 F.3d 815
Like the majority, I conclude that the рrosecutor‘s improper statement in the closing argument did not prejudice Smith so seriously as to require a new trial. The district court intervened promptly and appropriately, and Smith gives us no reason to think that the jury did not heed those instructions.
Trials are seldom perfect, and this one was no exceрtion. But
Before POSNER, WOOD, and TINDER, Circuit Judges.
WOOD, Circuit Judge.
For several years, Sean Patrick made his living as a pimp, trafficking both minors and adult women. His career came to an abrupt halt in May 2010 when he was arrested in connection with the shooting death of another Milwaukee pimp. Federal sex trafficking charges under
I
In 2010 Patrick was arrested for the murder of a fellow Milwaukee pimp. He pleaded guilty in state court to reckless homicide and was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. In his state homicide proceeding, Patrick provided information about an unresolved kidnapping and testified against another defendant charged with prostitution-related crimes. The state‘s attorney wrote a letter affirming that Patrick “provid[ed] detailed and credible testimony at the trial.” Patrick‘s cooperation was “meaningful and significant,” the letter said, because his testimony “was probative and most probably relied upon by the jury.”
After Patrick pleaded guilty to the state homicide charges, federal prosecutors indicted him on the charges that form the basis of the present case: conspiracy to traffic minor and adult women for the purpose of prostitution. Patrick again cooperated, this time in the U.S. government‘s prosecution against him. In addition, he accepted responsibility for the crimes and acknowledged that what he had done was morally and legally wrong. Patrick described himself as essentially “two people“: Before he was arrested for the homicide in May 2010, he was a “confused individual who thought material things and money would buy happiness“; now, he stated, he wants to set an example of “what happens when you don‘t go to school and you get caught up in thinking money is everything.”
The probation department calculated an advisory range under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines of 360 months to life imprisonment for Patrick‘s four sex trafficking offenses. Noting the letter from the state‘s attorney and Patrick‘s provision of “enlightening” information about the prostitution business, the government moved the court to imposе a lesser sentence of 300 months’ imprisonment and to provide that this sentence would run concurrently with Patrick‘s state sentence.
At Patrick‘s sentencing hearing, the judge discussed Patrick‘s criminal history at length. He expressed his concern that crime causes poverty and described the decline of his own childhоod neighborhood. He then commented that it was hard to find “positives” about Patrick and rejected defense counsel‘s suggestion that Patrick
II
We review a district court‘s sentencing determination both for procedural soundness and for substantive reasonableness. This case raises only the former point, which turns here on two issues: whether Patrick‘s sentence ultimately was based on the considerations identified in
In practice, this means that the district court must give meaningful consideration to the characteristics of the defendant that might bear on the appropriate length of a sentence and explain how those characteristics influenced the sentence the court chose. Rita, 551 U.S. at 357 (“Where the defendant or prosecutor presents nonfrivolоus reasons for imposing a different sentence ... the judge will normally go further and explain why he has rejected those arguments.“); United States v. Miranda, 505 F.3d 785, 792 (7th Cir. 2007); United States v. Cunningham, 429 F.3d 673, 678 (7th Cir. 2005). A sentencing court is not obliged to engage in a lengthy discussion of every argument for leniency that the defendant raises. If a defendant‘s argu-
In Miranda, we ordered resentencing because the court failed to address the defendant‘s argument for lenience based on mental illness. 505 F.3d at 792. Even though it alluded to Miranda‘s mental illness, the court did not explain how it bore upon the
In the present case, Patrick argues not only that similar irrelevancies accounted for his sentence, but also that the court failed to consider his most significant argument for leniency—his cooperation with the authorities. Although the government stressed Patrick‘s violent career as a pimp at the sentencing hearing, the Assistant U.S. Attorney also made the following comment:
Because of [Patrick‘s] coоperation in the State—and you have the letter. And because of that cooperation, we are moving downward from the guidelines a bit. I‘m asking the Court to impose a sentence of 300 months. That is 25 years. No fine. He should be ordered to pay his child support. I would note that his child support obligation—he has 12 children—is more than $146,000 outstanding. So no fine. Of course the special assessment is mandatory. And I believe that five years of supervised release would be appropriate.
The AUSA then added that he was asking for a sentence concurrent to the state sentence, not consecutive. He alsо elaborated a bit on the assistance that Patrick had provided, commenting that “it was quite enlightening for those of us who had the opportunity to sit with him.” The district court thus had before it a solid basis for finding that Patrick‘s cooperation had indeed been meaningful and that it might warrant some kind of discount on his sentence.
As wе have already stated, however, the court passed by this point with only the conclusory remark “I was going to
Most worrisome is our inability to discern whether the court appreciated the severity of the sentence it imposed, and in particular its equivalence to the life sentence that it had purportedly rejected. Perhaps a 360-month sentence concurrent to Patrick‘s 20-year state sentence would not have been problematic, but a 360-month consecutive sentence in Patrick‘s case is effectively a life sentence. Patrick‘s sentence runs until he is 86, and the average life expectancy for a male of Patrick‘s age and race is approximately 72 years. (According to the Center for Disease Control, a 38-year-old black male is expected to live another 34.6 years, or to the age of 72.6. National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 54, No. 14 (April 19, 2006) at 22, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf.) Because “a sentence of death in prison is notably harsher than a sentence that stops even a short period before,” we have stated that “death in prison is not to be ordered lightly, and the probability that a convict will not live out his sentence should certainly give pausе to a sentencing court.” United States v. Wurzinger, 467 F.3d 649, 652 (7th Cir. 2006).
Had the court looked more carefully at both its proposed sentence and the credit that it thought Patrick‘s cooperation warranted, it likely would have recognized the severity of the de facto life sentence that it was contemplating and either would have rejected that for something more moderate or would have explained why it believed that a sentence so much harsher than the concurrent sentence the government had recommended was nonetheless reasonable.
III
We therefore remand for resentencing. We make no prediction on the question whether this will change the result for Patrick. He was, as the government reminds us in its brief, a man who recruited disadvantaged minor girls for prostitution, who subjected them to beatings and other abuse to control them, and who killed a rival pimp by shooting him with a semi-automatic handgun. Patrick is serving time now for that crimе. On the other hand, both the state authorities and the AUSA vouched for his cooperation after his arrest. It is up to the district court to decide how to weigh these competing factors, focusing solely on the materials properly in the sentencing record. The case is therefore REMANDED for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. Circuit Rule 36 shall apply on remand.