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Fourth Circuit· 6/30/1994

United States v. William Jay Cole

Citations

  • 27 F.3d 996
  • 1994 U.S. App. LEXIS 16354
  • 1994 WL 287171

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

  • noting that the “record must reflect that defendant knew that he had a right to speak in mitigation”
  • observing that sentence imposed was at bottom of guidelines range, but identifying “at least two grounds” that defendant could have advanced to persuade court to downwardly adjust offense level and thereby lower applicable range
  • finding that defendant demonstrated prejudice from denial of allocution because he might have been able to reduce his offense level by showing that he should be held accountable for lesser drug quantity or had accepted responsibility
  • finding plain error as to the denial of allocution rights where the court did not let defendant speak at all
  • declining to adopt a per se rule that denials of the right to allocution are prejudicial
  • rejecting per se rule, but holding that if there is any possibility of a lower sentence, “we are unable to say that [defendant] was not prejudiced by the denial of his right to allocute”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).

Judges: Hall, Luttig, Brinkema, Eastern, Virginia

Read full opinion on CourtListener

Cited by

27 cases in this archive cite this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

Cites

7 cases in this archive are cited by this case.

Sourced from CourtListener / Free Law Project (CC0).

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