On April 3 the Supreme Court rendered a decision in Dean v. U. S. (Docket No. 15-9260), giving trial courts more flexibility in sentencing federal firearms defendants. 18 U.S.C. Section 924(c) criminalizes using or carrying a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence or drug trafficking crime. The first offense carries a five year mandatory minimum sentence that must run consecutively with the underlying sentence. A second offense in the same indictment carries a 25 year mandatory minimum sentence which must be served consecutively to the underlying offense and the original 924(c).
The Supreme Court held that trial courts may consider the extraordinary length of these sentences in fashioning a sentence for the underlying offense. Courts are required to consider all the sentencing factors in 18 U.S.C. Section 3553(a) before arriving at a sentence. Until this case, courts were not allowed to consider the length of mandatory minimums that must run consecutively. Now, there is nothing to prevent sentencing courts from imposing a sentence as low as one day for the predicate offense in light of the consecutive mandatory minimum sentence.
