US v. Brown, No. 05-2170, affirms the conviction and sentence of a defendant. The sentence is affirmed for reasonableness (and some interesting crack-related tidbits), but first you gotta read about evidence.
- Two “lack of personal knowledge of identity” objections under Fed. R. Evid. 602 are found not to a harmless abuse of discretion, when the government argues that it was offered not to show what the speaker was saying, but rather why the government reacted to it. But there isn’t any real discussion of the actual objections. Damn.
- While the crack v. powder disparity doesn’t appear to come up, the First finds that a visual identification of the substance was enough to determine it to be crack, and “Lay opinion as to the appearance of a substance to this effect may be used to prove that the substance is crack.” (This is going a little far. I wouldn’t be able to tell crack if I stepped in it.) Whatever the case, there was evidence suggesting that, yes, it was crack. The court notes that “cocaine base” for purposes of 21 U.S.C. § 841 "includes all forms of cocaine base, including but not limited to crack.", but U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(c), Note (D), “forms of cocaine base other than crack are treated as cocaine.”
- Finally, as to reasonableness, the court finds that since the Judge looked at the record as a whole, his sentence wasn’t unreasonable, and the First doesn’t think that the court considered them to be presumptively reasonable, but rather gave them “due weight” Whatever that means.