In 2018, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives (ATF) uncovered narcotics and drug paraphernalia at a Washington, D.C. barbershop and in the homes of those who ran the operation and acted as the gatekeeper. Although Lonnell Tucker was caught in the act of selling a small quantity of drugs to a government informant one time at the barbershop (a “controlled buy”), ATF agents lacked any direct proof that he was part of the drug trafficking operation. Nevertheless, a jury convicted Tucker of conspiring to sell drugs, basing its findings on circumstantial evidence (a drug dealer’s claim that Tucker was frequently at the barbershop “acting like [he] had a license to sell drugs”) and a single drug sale to a confidential informant. The court was supposed to base Tucker’s sentence in part on the amount of drugs attributed to him, which was the small amount of drugs sold in the controlled buy. However, despite any direct evidence to support its claims, the court reasoned that since Tucker was a frequent visitor to the barbershop, he had been selling drugs five times a week over the course of thirty weeks.
Based on that speculative calculation (the small quantity of drugs involved in a single controlled buy multiplied by the possibility of five visits a week over the course of a 30-week investigation), the court sentenced Tucker to five years in prison. Tucker appealed and asked the D.C. Circuit Court to recalculate his sentence. However, the Court affirmed the prison term, relying on the trial court’s speculative calculation and disturbingly claiming that “drug quantity calculations are an art, not a science.” Appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, The Rutherford Institute joined a number of leading criminal law scholars and organizations to denounce such speculative sentencing practices.
Dawinder S. Sidhu, Shon R. Hopwood, and Kyle Singhal of Hopwood & Singhal PLLC advanced the arguments in the Tucker v. U.S. amicus brief.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
The amicus brief in Tucker v. U.S. is available at www.rutherford.org.
Source: https://bit.ly/3tpshoc
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