United States v. Frye
| Decision Date | 15 March 1966 |
| Docket Number | No. 15402.,15402. |
| Citation | 358 F.2d 140 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Howard FRYE, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
Howard Frye, pro se.
Edward V. Hanrahan, U. S. Atty., John Peter Lulinski, Lawrence Jay Weiner, Patrick F. Healy, Asst. U. S. Attys., Chicago, Ill., Richard A. Makarski, Asst. U. S. Atty., of counsel, for appellee.
Before HASTINGS, Chief Judge, and KNOCH and CASTLE, Circuit Judges.
Howard Frye, defendant-appellant, was convicted under a nine-count indictment charging substantive narcotics violations and conspiracy. The conviction, and the convictions of co-defendants Fred Coduto and Coyit Baker, were affirmed in United States v. Coduto, 7 Cir., 284 F.2d 464.
The trial court pronounced sentence upon the defendants Frye and Baker as follows:
.
The judgment and commitment order entered in the cause is signed by the sentencing judge, the late Julius H. Miner, and reflects a sentence of 20 years imprisonment imposed on defendant Frye.1
Frye prosecutes this appeal from the District Court's denial of his Rule 36, Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, motion to correct the judgment and commitment order to reflect a sentence of only 10 years. Defendant contends that the oral pronouncement of the sentence is ambiguous — is susceptible to the construction that each of the defendants is sentenced to 10 years — with the result that defendant is entitled to the construction favorable to him, and to have the judgment and commitment order corrected accordingly.
It strains credulity to assume that the sentencing judge might have intended to impose a collective sentence to be shared equally, or in some other manner, by the two defendants. And, only by invoking such an unwarranted assumption is it possible to read into the court's pronouncement a basis for the ambiguity claimed. To do so would be contrary to the teaching of United States v. Daugherty, 269 U.S. 360, 363, 46 S.Ct. 156, 157, 70 L.Ed. 309, that:
Moreover, the order signed by the sentencing judge clearly specifies that Frye is sentenced to imprisonment for a...
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U.S. v. Kammerud
...(7th Cir.) (error in written judgment and commitment as revealed by record), cert. denied, 403 U.S. 934 (1971); United States v. Frye, 358 F.2d 140, 141 (7th Cir.1966) (ambiguous sentencing directive inconsistent with judgment and commitment order), cert. denied, 386 U.S. 1008 (1967); Unite......
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Baker v. United States, 16817.
...of the urged construction that the district court intended that each defendant should be sentenced to ten years. United States v. Frye, 358 F.2d 140, 141 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 384 U.S. 980, 86 S.Ct. 1879, 16 L.Ed.2d 690 Petitioner claims in this action that the commitment order upon whi......
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