United States v. Brown
| Decision Date | 16 February 2022 |
| Docket Number | 20-1959 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Appellee, v. EDWARD BROWN, Defendant, Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit |
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF NEW HAMPSHIRE [Hon. George Z. Singal, U.S. District Judge]
Benjamin L. Falkner, with whom Krasnoo, Klehm & Falkner LLP was on brief, for appellant.
Seth R. Aframe, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom John L. Farley, Acting United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee.
Before Thompson and Kayatta, Circuit Judges, and Katzmann, [*] Judge.
Before us a second time, Edward Brown, who has been in prison for the last thirteen years for tax fraud and his role in a well-publicized armed standoff with the U.S. Marshals Service, appeals from his lengthy, but shorter-than-original sentence of 300 months in prison. Lodging claims of both constitutional and sentencing error, he seeks to have his new sentence tossed in exchange for a sentence of time served. After careful review, we disagree, and so affirm.
The story of this case begins back in 2006.[1] Then, Edward Brown and his wife, Elaine Brown, were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges related to their failure to pay taxes.[2] They went to trial, although Edward attended only a few days before he decided to stop showing up. Their defense was that the government had no legal authority to collect the taxes. Eventually, a jury convicted both Edward and Elaine. But neither showed up for sentencing. They were each sentenced, in absentia, to 63 months in prison. Neither Edward nor Elaine surrendered to the federal authorities to serve their sentences.
It is that failure to surrender which leads us to the crimes of conviction at issue in Edward's appeal today.[3] Warrants for the Browns' arrest issued. Meanwhile, Edward was holed up at his New Hampshire residence along with Elaine. Though the U.S. Marshals Service knew where the Browns were, getting them into custody proved less than straightforward (to say the least). For about eight months, Edward made violent threats toward the government officials attempting to arrest them, such as (as one of the Marshals recalled at trial): "If anything happens to my wife or I, then everybody associated with this case will get theirs." As another Marshal recalled at trial, Edward said he thought the police were afraid to arrest him and that, if the authorities arrested him, The Browns also made repeated public statements about their standoff, welcoming into their fortified home a number of supporters who agreed to help them out, including Daniel Riley, Jason Gerhard, Cirino Gonzalez, and Robert Wolffe.[4] Realizing that a standard arrest wouldn't do for this high-risk circumstance, the Marshals began to develop plans to try to safely arrest the Browns. In the first attempt, officers tried to move clandestinely onto the property and arrest Edward on his routine of grabbing the mail at the end of his driveway. That attempt, though, failed when Riley, who was out walking a dog, encountered hidden officers. Riley was taken into custody, and when Edward heard the commotion, he was seen ascending a tower on top of his home and brandishing a .50-caliber rifle, pointing it toward the driveway.
After that failed attempt, the Marshals backed off for a few months while they hatched a new plan. In the meantime, they began to round up some of the Browns' soon-to-be convicted co-conspirators, who Marshals, for strategic reasons, had up to that point allowed to enter and exit the compound. And those arrests yielded a wealth of information about what the Marshals were facing inside the Brown enclave.
For example, Riley told the Marshals that he purchased twelve pounds of Tannerite, an explosive amalgam, at Edward's request. Gonzalez, Riley relayed, had brought firearms to the compound and had performed armed patrols around the property with an assault rifle. Riley also told the Marshals that numerous handguns and rifles were stashed throughout strategic locations in the house. And he noted at least two black-powder explosive devices were in the home, plus he believed there were ten-to-twenty more of them in there. While detained, Riley also admitted to another inmate that he had assembled spring guns and placed explosive containers on trees around the home. Wolffe told the Marshals about the cache of firearms in the home, and that Edward and Riley had tested which firearms were best suited to make the biggest explosions when fired at the Tannerite devices.
Flash forward to October 2007, and it was time for the Marshals to test their newest game plan for seizing the Browns. The new strategy began with undercover Marshals contacting the Browns through a confidential informant. Along with the informant, three undercover Marshals retrieved some property from Elaine's dental office (which she had requested) and brought it to the Browns at their compound. After the delivery was complete, Edward brought beer onto the porch for the four retrievers and for a fourth undercover Marshal who had since arrived. After using the agreed-upon time-to-make-a-move codeword the Marshals had established, the undercover officers grabbed Edward, tasered him, and took him into custody. Other Marshals seized Elaine, and everyone walked away unscathed.
After the arrest, authorities searched the Browns' property. Numerous improvised explosive devices were scattered thereabout, which experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had to remove. Officials also found trip wires, shotgun shells from spring guns, and Tannerite bombs and plastic bags containing propane cans nailed to trees around the property. Inside the house, officials recovered eighteen firearms ranging from pistols to .50-caliber rifles. They also turned up approximately 60, 000 rounds of live ammunition, including armor-piercing and incendiary rounds. In a single closet in the Browns' master bedroom, agents located twenty-two assembled and active pipe bombs. Elsewhere in the house, they found nine fully assembled spring guns, including evidence that they at one point had been mounted in the tree line. Agents also recovered cans of gun powder, some of which had nails taped to them. And, if all of that wasn't enough, even more explosive-making materials were recovered in various spots in the home.
Following their capture, a federal grand jury indicted Edward and Elaine, charging Edward on seven counts. Count I charged conspiracy to prevent officers of the United States from discharging their duties, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 372. Count II -- conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 371 and 111(a) & (b). Count III charged him with carrying and possessing a firearm in connection with a crime of violence, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1). Count V -- being a felon in possession of a firearm, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). Count VII -- obstruction of justice, in violation of 18 U.S.C § 1503. Count IX charged Edward with failing to appear for his tax-fraud trial, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 3146. And Count X -- failing to appear for sentencing in the tax-fraud case, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 3146.[5] Edward and Elaine went to trial, and they both were convicted on all counts.
Following on from his occasional outbursts at the trial, Edward was rather combative at his original sentencing and accompanying competency proceeding. Throughout the proceedings, he often lodged his own objections, even though he was represented by counsel. He butted in to argue about a competency witness's testimony while he was still on the stand, interrupted the government's counsel (one time, for example, to call him a liar), and interrupted the judge to argue with him and call him "beautiful." At one point when he was being removed from the courtroom, Edward accused the judge of being a "criminal" and a "communist." After being returned to the courtroom following a "timeout," Edward even told the judge that the district court readying to sentence him was "not a court." After Edward exercised his allocution rights, the judge proceeded to explain the sentence he imposed. But interjecting himself during that process, Edward demanded to be taken out of the courtroom again, as in his telling, he had "had enough of this trash." The court obliged his request.
Speaking of his allocution, Edward went on an extended rant about what he sees as a crisis of our country. Edward revealed to the court that he is a member of a group called the United States Constitution Rangers, whose goal is to "defend[] the Constitution and the people of the United States Republic." According to Edward, one core principle of the Rangers' philosophy is that its members "will ignore . . . any laws or orders that violate" certain constitutions and their Bill of Rights. And he openly questioned the authority of the federal laws, suggesting that the United States Constitution from 1789 was illegally replaced in 1879. Edward further informed the court that he intended to "expose a [criminal] cell in the government." Addressing his crimes, Edward told the court that he "could have killed all five of those agents [who came to arrest him] easily and lawfully."
In handing down the sentence, the district court explained its rationale. Noting that Edward had "engaged in a long period of lawlessness and endangered multiple government officials in the discharge of their duties," the court found Edward (who, recall, was no longer in the courtroom at his own request) to be "entirely...
To continue reading
Request your trial