Fundamental Fairness And Your Tax Dollars At Work.

Undercover agent met with defendants with a story he was a cocaine courier who transported drugs for a group of Mexican drug dealers and was unhappy with the pay he was receiving. He said he was interested in robbing those Mexican drug dealers as retribution for his low pay. He recruited defendants to carry out an armed robbery of a fictional cocaine stash house.  The defendants readily agreed and participated in planning the robbery for several days. They were arrested when they were on their way to rob the supposed stash house. After conviction, at the time of sentencing, they argued the government was guilty of sentencing entrapment because it deliberately set an amount of cocaine in the fictional robbery to ensure the defendants sentence of 10 years on the conspiracy count. The district court denied their requests to reduce the quantity of cocaine in calculating their sentence. The Ninth Circuit agreed with the trial court, concluding the defendants had not reached the “extremely high standard” of demonstrating that the facts underlying their arrest and prosecution are so extreme as to violate fundamental fairness.  (United States of America v. Black (Ninth Cir.; October 23, 2013) 733 F.3d 294.