United States v. Bowline

917 F.3d 1227
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
DecidedMarch 11, 2019
Docket17-7080
StatusPublished
Cited by36 cases

This text of 917 F.3d 1227 (United States v. Bowline) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Bowline, 917 F.3d 1227 (10th Cir. 2019).

Opinion

HARTZ, Circuit Judge.

Defendant Ian Alexander Bowline was convicted by a jury in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma on a number of charges involving unlawful prescriptions for oxycodone. He appeals his conviction, raising only one issue: whether the district court properly denied his untimely pretrial motion to dismiss his indictment on the ground of vindictive prosecution. The district court ruled (1) that he was procedurally barred because he had not shown good cause under Fed. R. Crim. P. 12(c)(3) to excuse his untimeliness and (2) that on the merits he had not demonstrated that he was being subjected to a vindictive prosecution. Defendant appeals. He does not argue that he had good cause for his untimely motion but contends that he can nevertheless raise his vindictive-prosecution claim on appeal under a plain-error standard of review, which he claims he satisfied. Exercising jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 , we affirm because Defendant is not entitled to relief on appeal absent a showing of good cause to excuse the untimeliness of his motion. We therefore need not reach the merits of his vindictive-prosecution claim.

I. BACKGROUND

Defendant's trial was his second on charges arising out of the oxycodone prescriptions. We reversed his convictions after the first trial. See United States v. Bowline , 674 F. App'x 781 (10th Cir. 2016). Although, as we will describe more fully later, the charges at the second trial were different, the evidence concerned the same scheme. Defendant, who was not a doctor, was able to write false prescriptions for oxycodone by obtaining watermarked prescription pads online and then using Drug Enforcement Administration physician identifiers and license numbers that he purchased online. "[H]is confederates-acting individually or in small groups-passed those prescriptions at various pharmacies. In exchange for their time and trouble, his confederates kept either a share of the pills they acquired, cash in lieu of their share, or some combination of the two. The rest of the pills went to [Defendant]." Id. at 782-83 .

At his first trial in March 2015, Defendant was convicted of conspiracy to distribute, and possess with intent to distribute, oxycodone, see 21 U.S.C. §§ 841 , 846, and interstate travel in aid of a racketeering enterprise (which was based on the drug conspiracy), see 18 U.S.C. § 1952 (a)(3). On appeal we held that the government had failed to prove that Defendant and his confederates conspired to distribute oxycodone. We explained that *1229 "the circumstances in this case don't lend themselves to an inference that [Defendant] and his confederates shared a common purpose to distribute Oxycodone. Instead, ... they shared only a common goal to obtain that drug." Bowline , 674 F. App'x. at 786 (brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). And "to the extent that [Defendant] entered into agreements with his various confederates under which they agreed to distribute Oxycodone to [Defendant], ... those agreements are insufficient to support [Defendant's] conviction for conspiracy to distribute." Id. at 784-85 . Were it otherwise, we said, every drug sale would amount to a conspiracy to distribute between the transferor and transferee. See id. at 784 . We reversed the convictions and remanded to the district court with instructions to vacate its judgment and 108-month sentence.

In January 2017 the government filed a new indictment against Defendant. Rather than again pursuing conspiracy-based charges, the government obtained an indictment on a number of previously uncharged substantive offenses: 11 counts of passing fraudulent prescriptions, see 21 U.S.C. 843(a)(3), and 11 counts of using a registration number of another in creating those prescriptions, see 21 U.S.C. 843(a)(2). Two counts were later dismissed on the government's motion.

The court set January 26 as the deadline for all pretrial motions. After that deadline passed, the government filed an unopposed motion to continue the trial, and the court issued an amended scheduling order postponing the trial date to April 4 and setting March 9 as the new deadline to file all pretrial motions. On April 1, the Saturday before the Tuesday trial and after both pretrial-motion deadlines had expired, Defendant filed a motion to dismiss his indictment for vindictive prosecution. The district court denied the motion as untimely under Fed. R. Crim. P. 12(c)(3). It found that "Defendant's basis for the motion to dismiss was known since the time the Indictment was returned" and Defendant had not shown good cause that would excuse his delay. R., Vol. 1 at 142. The court also rejected Defendant's motion on the merits. Defendant was convicted on 16 counts and sentenced to concurrent terms of 16 months on each count with credit for time served.

II. DISCUSSION

We hold that we cannot review an untimely motion claiming vindictive prosecution absent a showing of good cause. This court so held before the 2014 amendments to Rule 12, see United States v. Burke , 633 F.3d 984

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Bluebook (online)
917 F.3d 1227, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-bowline-ca10-2019.