College Caper Appeal Backfires, Robbers to Get Even More Time
Four college buddies who spent nearly a year planning to rob a group of very rare and valuable books from a Kentucky university would have been better-advised to focus on their studies.
For starters, they botched the robbery (the supersized tomes, including a $5 million volume of Audubon bird prints, apparently were heavier than they expected, plus they dropped several while fleeing from a head librarian in hot pursuit). Apprehended within a few months by authorities following a trail of e-mail clues, they wound up with federal felony convictions. And now their appeal of their prison terms hasn’t turned out as they expected.
The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in an opinion issued today that there was a sentencing error. But it didn’t reduce the 87-month prison sentences the four received after pleading guilty to robbery and conspiracy charges relating to the Transylvania University book heist. Instead, a three-judge appellate panel says in a written opinion (PDF) that their sentences should be increased on remand to between 108 and 135 months.
After dismissing other defense arguments as unpersuasive, the panel gets to the issue of how many of the rare books actually were taken by the thieves from the university library and lowers the boom: “The government argues that the district court erred by considering only the objects actually removed from the library building in tabulating the loss for its sentencing calculation,” the panel writes in an opinion authored by Judge Alice Batchelder. “We agree.”
Rather than counting only the objects that were actually removed from the library (multiple books and a folio of pencil drawings), the district judge should have taken into account as well all property over which the defendants exercised “dominion and control,” the opinion explains. This test was met concerning four other volumes before the defendants dropped them in a library stairwell. And the only reason the panel didn’t include in the total as well two Audubon volumes that were left behind on a pink bedsheet, apparently because they were too heavy to carry, is because the prosecution didn’t pursue this issue on appeal, the opinion notes.
One Audubon book, however, did not fall within the defendants’ dominion and control and thus should not be included among the swag total for sentencing purposes, the panel notes, because it was stuck in a drawer and could not be removed.
Hat tip to How Appealing.
