United States v. Salvador Lemus-Rodri

495 F. App'x 723
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
DecidedNovember 6, 2012
Docket11-3912
StatusUnpublished
Cited by7 cases

This text of 495 F. App'x 723 (United States v. Salvador Lemus-Rodri) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Seventh 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. Salvador Lemus-Rodri, 495 F. App'x 723 (7th Cir. 2012).

Opinion

ORDER

Salvador Lemus-Rodriguez, a Mexican citizen, was convicted of illegal reentry into the United States in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a). After a successful appeal of his sentence, the district court resentenced Lemus-Rodriguez to thirty months in prison, half of it to be served concurrently with an unrelated state-court sentence. Lemus-Rodriguez has appealed again, contending that the district court erred in failing to give him credit for the time he spent in federal custody prior to his sentencing. Because Lemus-Rodriguez was receiving credit on a state-court sentence for that time, we affirm.

Immigration officials caught up with Le-mus-Rodriguez in jail on January 18, 2008, following his arrest for sexually assaulting his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. On May 12, 2008, Lemus-Rodriguez was convicted of criminal sexual assault and sentenced to sixteen years’ imprisonment. At the time, Lemus-Rodriguez was in the United States unlawfully after two prior convictions for illegal reentry, 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a), and on June 4, 2008, he was charged, for the third time, with violating § 1326(a).

On June 18, 2008, the magistrate judge granted the Government’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum. The order granting the petition directed the warden at the Logan Correctional Center to produce Lemus-Rodriguez for his arraignment, and stated that Lemus-Rodriguez would be returned to the Logan Correctional Center once the proceedings in federal court had concluded, unless otherwise directed by the court.

A week later, on June 25, 2008, Lemus-Rodriguez was arraigned. He entered a plea of not guilty, and the magistrate judge issued an order remanding him into the custody of the U.S. Marshal. On December 3, 2008, Lemus-Rodriguez pleaded guilty to illegal reentry in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1326(a). The district court sentenced him to a term of seventy months’ imprisonment and three years of supervised release on June 11, 2009. Lemus-Rodriguez appealed, and we vacated the sentence and remanded the case for resen- *725 tencing because the district court erred in applying a sixteen-level enhancement for Lemus-Rodriguez’s prior firearm conviction.

The district court resentenced Lemus-Rodriguez on December 13, 2011. Prior to sentencing, Lemus-Rodriguez filed an objection to the Presentence Investigation Report. He argued that he had already served a total of 102.5 months in federal custody, 1 and asked the district court to sentence him to time served because his prior federal sentence had been only seventy months.

At the sentencing hearing, the district court expressed confusion regarding Le-mus-Rodriguez’s contention that he had served thirty-two months of incarceration over and above his federal sentence. Le-mus-Rodriguez’s attorney responded by withdrawing the statement. He said that he had not been aware that Lemus-Rodri-guez had been in state custody during the duration of the federal proceedings and confirmed that Lemus-Rodriguez received credit on his state-court sentence for that time. He nevertheless argued that the district court should consider the conditions in which Lemus-Rodriguez was confined during the federal proceedings in sentencing him. After determining a guidelines imprisonment range of thirty to thirty-seven months and considering the factors set forth in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), the district court sentenced Lemus-Rodri-guez to thirty months’ imprisonment, with fifteen months to run concurrent to his state-court sentence.

On appeal, Lemus-Rodriguez argues that he should have received credit towards his federal sentence for the time he served during the federal proceedings. He maintains that he had been in “federal custody” during that time, and points to the magistrate judge’s order remanding him to the custody of the U.S. Marshal in support. This argument fails for several reasons.

To start, as it is only a slightly modified version of the argument Lemus-Rodriguez abandoned at his sentencing hearing, the Government contends that he forfeited, if not waived, the argument. Lemus-Rodri-guez’s counsel maintains that he failed to raise this version of the argument before the district court because he was under the mistaken belief that Lemus-Rodriguez had not been remanded to federal custody. As “[w]aiver principles must be construed liberally in favor of the defendant,” United States v. Anderson, 604 F.3d 997, 1002 (7th Cir.2010) (citation omitted), and we “assume forfeiture where the government fails to proffer a strategic justification for a defendant’s decision to bypass an argument,” United States v. Johnson, 668 F.3d 540, 542 (7th Cir.2012) (citation omitted), we will review for plain error. The district court did not err, however, and Lemus-Rodriguez’s arguments to the contrary rest upon a faulty understanding of the writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum.

The writ of habeas corpus ad prosequen-dum enables a jurisdiction “to take temporary custody of a prisoner confined within another jurisdiction and indict, prosecute, and sentence such prisoner.” Flick v. Blevins, 887 F.2d 778, 781 (7th Cir.1989). Where, as here, “the writ expressly requires the return of the prisoner to the ‘sending’ state, the sending state retains full jurisdiction over the prisoner since the prisoner is only ‘on loan’ to the prosecuting jurisdiction.” Id. (citations omitted); Jake v. Herschberger, 173 F.3d 1059, 1061 n. 1 (7th Cir.1999) (“Because the receiving sovereign merely obtains limited jurisdiction *726 over the ‘borrowed’ prisoner, the prisoner is still under the jurisdiction of the sending sovereign, and is considered to be in the custody of the sending sovereign not the receiving sovereign.”). Thus, because the sending state retains primary jurisdiction over the prisoner, “federal custody commences only when the state authorities relinquish the prisoner on satisfaction of the state obligation.” United States v. Evans, 159 F.3d 908, 911-12 (4th Cir.1998) (citations omitted).

Here, Lemus-Rodriguez maintains that the district court erroneously determined that he was not in federal custody during the federal proceedings because the magistrate judge remanded him “to the custody of the U.S. Marshal” following his arraignment. This argument, however, ignores that Lemus-Rodriguez was in the physical custody of federal authorities pursuant to the ad prosequendum writ and was returned to the state following the federal proceedings.

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Bluebook (online)
495 F. App'x 723, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-salvador-lemus-rodri-ca7-2012.