United States v. Ellis

In 2009, law-enforcement officials investigated a Mexican cocaine-trafficking operation extending into the Kansas City area. This led them to several suspects, including defendant-appellant Marvin Ellis, a low-level powder-cocaine buyer. In 2012, Kansas police arrested Ellis after he fled from a traffic stop. A federal grand jury charged Ellis with several drug and firearm felonies. The most serious charge against Ellis was for his conspiring with 49 other persons to manufacture, distribute, or possess with the intent to distribute at least 5 kilograms of powder cocaine and 280 grams of crack cocaine. After the jury convicted Ellis on all charges, the district court imposed consecutive sentences for the cocaine-conspiracy count and a firearm count and concurrent sentences for the remaining counts. Ellis received a sentence of life without release on the cocaine-conspiracy count (after applying a sentencing enhancement), a mandatory-minimum five-year term for possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime, and statutory maximum sentences on all remaining counts. Later, the district court revoked Ellis’s supervised release from a 2007 federal conviction and sentenced him to an additional consecutive 24 months’ imprisonment. The Tenth Circuit affirmed Ellis’s cocaine-conspiracy conviction, but reversed the accompanying life-without-release sentence because; (1) the jury never found that Ellis was individually responsible for the charged amounts of powder or crack cocaine, either from his own acts or the reasonably foreseeable acts of his coconspirators; and (2) the government’s evidence did not show that omitting this element was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. View "United States v. Ellis" on Justia Law