United States v. Colston, 19-13518

• Decision Date: 13 July 2021
• Docket Number: No. 19-13518,19-13518
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Laneesha COLSTON, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

4 F.4th 1179

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Laneesha COLSTON, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 19-13518

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

July 13, 2021

Scott Alan Gray, Oliver McDonald, U.S. Attorney's Office, Mobile, AL, U.S. Attorney Service-Southern District of Alabama, U.S. Attorney's Office, Mobile, AL, for Plaintiff-Appellee

Peter Madden, Kristen Gartman Rogers, Carlos Alfredo Williams, Federal Defender's Office, Mobile, AL, for Defendant-Appellant.

Before GRANT, TJOFLAT, and ED CARNES, Circuit Judges.

GRANT, Circuit Judge:

Laneesha Colston walked into a post office, showed a tracking receipt on her phone, and walked out with a package containing roughly $200,000 worth of cocaine. But law enforcement was already onto her, and officers were lying in wait in the parking lot. As she returned to her car, officers seized the package and arrested her on the spot.

A jury found Colston guilty of two different drug crimes. She now asks us to overturn that verdict because, according to her, the government never proved that she knew what was inside the package. But the evidence presented at trial was enough to allow a rational jury to infer that she knew the package contained a controlled substance. And that is all it takes—knowledge of the specific substance is not required by the relevant statutes or our precedents.

Colston also contends that the district court erred by admitting text messages showing that she illegally sold prescription pills and by instructing the jury on a deliberate ignorance theory. But the court acted within its discretion when it admitted evidence of Colston's prior drug deals to show that her involvement in a different drug-related crime was not a mistake. And any error in instructing the jury on a deliberate ignorance theory was harmless because the jury heard sufficient evidence of actual knowledge. We affirm.

I.

Robert Gechijian, a postal inspector in Mobile, Alabama, was suspicious about a package he came across. It was heavily taped, it came from California (a known source state for illegal drugs), and the sender and recipient had the same last name. Gechijian decided to pull the package off the initial processing line and run the names and addresses through a law enforcement database. What he learned confirmed his suspicions: neither of the names on the package was associated with the addresses listed. But a Jose Eduardo Bravo Rodriguez—also known as "Pancho"—lived at the receiving address in Pensacola and was also associated with the sending zip code in California. More red flags: the sender paid a "large amount" in cash for postage and wanted the package to arrive in Florida within two days.

Law enforcement obtained a search warrant for the package. Once they opened it, they found two bricks of cocaine inside a tub labeled for protein powder. The bricks weighed about two kilograms—an "extraordinary amount of cocaine" with a street value of roughly $200,000.

Pancho, meanwhile, got nervous when the package failed to arrive on time. He turned to his mechanic's girlfriend, Laneesha Colston, for help tracking it down. Colston was a small-time local drug dealer; she sold prescription pills on the streets of Pensacola.

But Pancho did not entirely hand off matters to Colston—during a three-day period, they sent 67 text messages and had numerous phone calls. After days went by with no word on the package, Pancho decided to act. He told Colston that they should go to the post office in person, together. She agreed, so the next day the pair hit the road to search for the cocaine at two different post offices.

They started at a branch in northern Pensacola. A supervisor there observed that Colston was "very adamant that she needed her package." When it could not be found, Colston became visibly anxious and upset. That anxious behavior stood out to the supervisor.

The pair's next stop was a post office in Myrtle Grove, a nearby suburb. After they complained about the package being late, the supervisor there looked up the tracking information and reported that the package was in Mobile. The news was not well received. Colston, apparently distraught, walked out to the lobby, but quickly returned to ask if she could drive to Mobile herself to pick it up. The supervisor said yes, though he thought it odd that Colston would drive at least an hour to get a package rather than just waiting a few more days for it to be delivered in the ordinary course.

When Inspector Gechijian received word about Colston's efforts to track down the package full of cocaine, he decided to stage an undercover operation in Mobile. Posing as a mail clerk named Robert Allen, Gechijian called Colston to inquire whether she was still looking for her package. When she answered in the affirmative, "Allen" reassured her that the package was safe in Mobile. He promised her that he would have it delivered to Pensacola, but offered to hold it for her in Mobile if she wanted to come pick it up right away. With no hesitation, Colston said she would be in Mobile the next morning.

While she was still on the phone with "Allen," Colston received a text message from one of her frequent customers, who was missing a pill from his recent drug buy. She quickly replied to her buyer that she would figure out later if she had dropped one of his pills, but told him that he needed to "[h]old up" for now because she was "in the middle of something huge." Colston then turned her attention back to "Allen," and finalized the plans for her trip to Mobile.

As soon as Colston hung up she texted Pancho to fill him in on her call; he replied with a message asking her to relay "precisely" what she had learned from "Allen." Once he heard the details, he reached out to one of his employees, Mario Esteban-Reyes. Pancho asked Reyes, who had already picked up drugs for him nearly a dozen times, to accompany Colston to the Mobile post office. For his part, Reyes knew that Colston was associated with Pancho because he had seen her at Pancho's house twice before. He agreed to go with her.

Early the next morning, Colston, Reyes, and Pancho met up at Pancho's home, where Colston and Pancho talked about plans for picking up the package. After that, Colston and Reyes took off; Colston was behind the wheel. In her rush to get to Mobile, she "drove like a crazy woman," speeding and "swerving from one lane to the other." At one point, Colston even asked Reyes if he was scared.

When the pair arrived at the post office (30 minutes before the scheduled pickup time), Colston went into the lobby, while Reyes waited in the car. After confirming that Colston had the correct tracking number, Gechijian brought out the package and handed it over. Colston, he later reported, was "happy," "joyful," and "extremely elated." But not for long. Once Colston returned to the car, officers arrested her, arrested Reyes, and seized the package of cocaine. As Colston and Reyes were transported to the station, she begged him to "tell the police officers that she had nothing to do" with the crime in hopes that they would "release her soon."

Once they arrived at the station, Colston waived her Miranda rights and told the officers her own tale of how she ended up at the Mobile post office. She explained that the man waiting in the car with her was named Carlos Lopez and that he had paid her $150 to translate as he tried to find a missing package. She had done translation work for "Lopez" in the past, she said, describing one instance when she accompanied him to a hospital to deal with a rash. She also falsely reported to the officers that it was Lopez who had gone with her to the two post offices in Pensacola the day before. When Inspector Gechijian pressed her on whether anyone else was involved, Colston denied it. And despite "numerous opportunities" to identify other people involved, she never once mentioned Pancho.

Apparently not realizing that the jail recorded inmates’ phone conversations, Colston called her boyfriend. He must not have known either, because he immediately started to shore up the details of her cover story. He told her that he had talked to "the other person" and clarified with him that she was "only there to translate." The "other person," he said, had agreed to say the same. Colston's boyfriend reiterated throughout the call that the "only thing [she was] doing was translating," and he reminded her that she did not "know anything." Colston confirmed that she understood. As the conversation progressed to her upcoming court date, the boyfriend repeated his instruction: "Say that you were only there to translate ok?" Again, she agreed. Not yet certain that Colston had gotten the message, at the end of the call he instructed her that the "only thing" she needed to say—"listen to me good"—was that she did not know "him" and was "only there for translation."

The couple talked the next day, and the boyfriend continued to push the same story. He told Colston she would be in court soon, reminding her to "say that they took [her] over there to translate." Colston confirmed the approach: "Yes, only that." The boyfriend, for whatever reason, was still not satisfied: "Who took you? You say that they sent for you. That you went with that guy and didn't know anyone else." He ended the call by telling Colston—yet again—that she "didn't even know" Reyes and reminded her that she came to the post office "only to translate."

About a month later, a grand jury returned an indictment charging Colston and Reyes with two drug offenses: knowingly possessing with intent to distribute "a Schedule II controlled substance, to-wit: approximately 2 kilograms of cocaine" in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) and conspiring to distribute "a Schedule II controlled substance, to-wit: cocaine" in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 846. The indictment also specified that the crimes involved more than 500 grams of cocaine, so the defendants were subject to the higher penalties set out in 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(B)....