Sentencing; Procedural reasonableness; Whether the district court properly added three kilograms of crack cocaine found in a safe in defendant’s home to its determination of “relevant conduct”; USSG § 1B1.3(a)(2); United States v. Gill; United States v. Bradley, Gall v. United States; § 2D1.1; United States v. Phillips; United States v. Buchanan; United States v. Moore (Unpub. 6th Cir.); Food Lion, LLC v. Dean Foods Co. (In re Se. Milk Antitrust Litig.); United States v. Woods; United States v. Henry; United States v. Shannon; United States v. Hill; United States v. White; United States v. Rayyan; Substantive reasonableness; United States v. Clayton; United States v. Faulkner; United States v. Vonner

The court held that the district court did not err by considering drugs found in an upstairs safe at defendant-Benton’s residence as “relevant conduct” when sentencing him for trafficking drugs. He pled guilty to conspiring to possess with the intent to distribute and conspiring to distribute cocaine. He challenged his sentence, arguing that the district court erred by adding three kilograms of crack cocaine found in a safe in his home to its determination of relevant conduct under the USSG. The crack cocaine in the safe was found pursuant to a search of his home right after a transaction involving powder cocaine. The court considered his challenge to be essentially one of procedural reasonableness, and emphasized that “[a] defendant’s uncharged trafficking offense for one controlled substance can constitute relevant conduct when the defendant is sentenced for trafficking in another.” Thus, Benton’s “uncharged instance of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine constitutes ‘relevant conduct’ if it is ‘part of the same course of conduct or common scheme or plan’ as Benton’s cocaine trafficking offense.” He argued that the cocaine in the safe was “unsellable junk” and could not be considered when determining relevant conduct. However, the court framed the issue as “not whether Benton could sell the crack cocaine at the time it was seized, but whether he intended to sell (and thereby distribute) that crack cocaine.” It held that wiretap evidence, the fact that the cocaine was in a safe near a gun, along with other evidence, indicated an intent to sell. Also, the court held that the powdered cocaine and the crack cocaine in the safe were “‘sufficiently connected or related to each other as to warrant the conclusion that they are part of a single episode, spree, or ongoing series of offenses.’” Further, the district court gave sufficient reasons for sentencing Benton to a longer sentence than his co-conspirator, and the court held that his 260-month sentence was substantively reasonable considering that he was “a career criminal who regrettably broke the law as a matter of course. Whether it was possessing, abusing, or trafficking drugs, carrying weapons while on probation, driving under the influence, or domestic violence, crime was Benton’s lifestyle.” Affirmed.