Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Tenth Circuit Blog

Criminal Law

: Tenth Circuit Blog

Sentence Reversed Because District Court Underestimated Its Discretion

By Shari Allison

U.S. v. Garcia-Salas, 2007 WL 4553913 (12/27/07)(unpub'd) - The 10th reverses the district judge for thinking he had less discretion than he really had. The defendant's grounds for variance included: (1) his prosthetic leg made his prison conditions bad; (2) he was a good stay-at-home father with two kids and he worked devotedly in a group that tried to discourage teenagers from having children; and (3) he suffered lots of traumas as a child, e.g. train running over his leg, abandonment by his mom, the suicide of his stepmom on his 10th birthday. The judge, having been reversed for both a below-guideline range sentence in Cage and an above-guideline range sentence in Atencio, said he felt it would be "very difficult" to impose a sentence outside the guideline range under those decisions...continue to full post

Full post as published by Tenth Circuit Blog on January 03, 2008 (boomark / email).