In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
No. 11-2355
U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
P RINCE A. S TEVENSON,
Defendant-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Central District of Illinois.
No. 3:09-cr-30077—Richard Mills, Judge.
A RGUED A PRIL 2, 2012—D ECIDED M AY 14, 2012
Before R OVNER, S YKES, and T INDER, Circuit Judges.
R OVNER, Circuit Judge. A jury found Prince
Stevenson guilty of distributing cocaine base (crack),
but Stevenson claims that the jury had insufficient evi-
dence to do so. This is a challenging claim to make,
of course, because we will overturn a jury verdict for
insufficiency of the evidence only if the record is devoid
of evidence from which a reasonable jury could find
guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. United States v. Aslan,
644 F.3d 526, 540 (7th Cir. 2011).
2 No. 11-2355
That evidence, which we view in the light most
favorable to the government (Id.), is as follows: Some-
time in 2008, Stevenson and Mark Woods joined forces
to sell drugs. Woods had been the drug supplier to a
purchaser named Kelli Quincy, to whom he sold
drugs every Wednesday and every other weekend. In
July 2008, law enforcement officers learned that Woods
intended to sell drugs to Quincy near a Walgreens phar-
macy in Jacksonville, Illinois. An officer staked out the
location and saw Woods and Quincy meet, but did not
arrest either of them.
The following month, the same officer observed
Quincy’s car at Stevenson’s residence. As she drove
away, another officer stopped her car and found a crack
pipe, a small amount of crack, and her young son in
the back seat. Quincy quickly confessed that she had
been buying crack regularly from Woods and Stevenson
and agreed to work as a confidential informant.
In her role as informant, Quincy purchased crack
from Stevenson three times under the careful watch of
law enforcement. Law enforcement officers executed
each controlled buy similarly. The investigators would
meet Quincy at a rural location outside of Jacksonville.
There, an investigator would take Quincy’s purse and
place it in his truck and then watch Quincy as she
shook out her clothes and turned out her pockets.
Another agent would search the entire car and place
an audio and video recording device in the back of the
car. The officers gave Quincy money for the drug
purchase and then trailed her to the Walgreens parking
No. 11-2355 3
lot. From there, surveillance officers watched as Steven-
son arrived at the parking lot, parked by Quincy’s car,
entered her car, exited the car, and drove away. Each
time, the audio and video equipment caught Stevenson’s
voice and image. After the exchange, the investigators
followed Quincy back to the farm where Quincy turned
over the crack and the officers repeated their search
of Quincy and the car.
Quincy bought crack in this manner on three occasions.
On September 17, 2008, she bought .77 grams of crack
and repaid a $90 debt for a total of $190. On September 19,
2008, she bought 1.1 grams of crack for $200, and on
September 26, 2008, she paid $200 for one gram of crack.
Stevenson argued to the jury that the government
failed to produce sufficient evidence to meet its burden.
He contended that in order to convict, the jury would
have to believe the testimony of the crack-addicted
Quincy, desperate to extricate herself from the bubbling
cauldron of her own legal troubles. Stevenson presented
a counter-theory that Quincy, looking for a reduced
sentence for her own charges, “scraped together some
crack” from the floor of her car after she left the farm,
and it was this crack that she turned over to law enforce-
ment, claiming it came from Stevenson. (See R. 87, Tr.
at 383)1 . In support of this theory, Stevenson criticized
the government for failing to perform a more thorough
1
“R.” indicates the record number in the district court.
“Tr.” indicates the page of the consecutively numbered tran-
script (which spans several record numbers).
4 No. 11-2355
search of Quincy or use a dog to sniff the car before
she left, for not positioning a video camera in the front
seat of the car, and for not testing the drug baggies
for Stevenson’s fingerprints.
The government presented a different story to the
jury, demonstrating how officers searched Quincy and
her car for drugs and contraband before the controlled
buy, but found none (although conceding that they did
not check throughly Quincy’s undergarments or
conduct a pat-down search). The government then
showed the jury surveillance tape of Quincy meeting
Stevenson in a Walgreens parking lot, with Stevenson
pulling up next to Quincy’s car, getting in the car and
exchanging words indicative of a drug deal. “I won’t be
smoking all of this,” Quincy says. “Okay,” Stevenson
replies. During the next transaction, she promises him
that he is going to make more money selling drugs to
her at a later date. He replies, “Right, I’m gonna—I make
money every day with or without you.” Finally, when
she suggests that the amount looked small by saying,
“Oh, good, we get little baggies,” Stevenson responds,
“No, it’s good stuff. No that’s good stuff.” After the
brief exchanges, he quickly leaves the car. Quincy
arrived back at the farm without the money and with
the drugs in hand. Finally, the government presented
evidence that the drugs tested positive for crack cocaine.
In order to overturn Stevenson’s conviction, we would
have to conclude that no reasonable jury could have
believed the government’s version of events over
Stevenson’s version. United States v. Durham, 645 F.3d 883,
No. 11-2355 5
892 (7th Cir. 2011), cert. denied, 132 S.Ct. 1538 (2012). More
accurately, if we conclude that any rational trier of fact,
viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to
the prosecution, could have found the essential elements
of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, then the convic-
tion must be upheld. Id. Only if the record is devoid
of evidence from which a reasonable jury could find
guilt beyond a reasonable doubt can Stevenson’s con-
viction be overturned. Id.
The jury was well-informed that Quincy was a
drug addict, that she had received immunity, and that
she received $220 for her participation as an informant.
The court admonished the jury that it might “give her
testimony such weight as you feel it deserves, keeping
in mind that it must be considered with caution and
great care.” (R. 44, p. 143). The jury was similarly
informed that Mark Woods had agreed to cooperate
with the government in the hope of receiving a
reduced sentence for his crimes, that he had served
four prior prison terms, that he previously had been
convicted of selling illegal drugs, and that his testimony
should also be considered with caution and great care.
Despite all of this, the jury chose to believe Quincy’s
and Woods’ testimony, or at least believed that their
testimony, along with the other evidence, was sufficient
to prove Stevenson’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It
is the jury’s job, and not ours, to gauge the credibility of
the witnesses and decide what inferences to draw from
the evidence. United States v. Mandel, 647 F.3d 710,
717 (7th Cir. 2011). We do not second guess such deter-
minations on appeal. United States v. Boisture, 563 F.3d
6 No. 11-2355
295, 298 (7th Cir. 2009). This is particularly so where
the jury has been properly informed through cross-exami-
nation, jury instructions, or both, about drug use,
criminal background, and alternative motivation. See, e.g.,
United States v. Bailey, 510 F.3d 726, 734 (7th Cir.
2007); United States v. Wilson, 31 F.3d 510, 514 (7th Cir.
1994) (stating that this court will uphold a conviction
“even if the evidence is totally uncorroborated and
comes from an admitted liar, convicted felon, large-scale
drug dealing, paid government informant.”)
A prophylactic rule that drug-using witnesses are
per se unbelievable would derail most drug pros-
ecutions which frequently involve, of necessity,
the testimony of drug users. These witnesses’ short-
comings must be accounted for through cross-examina-
tion, not an exclusionary rule. Accordingly, we will
not upset the jury’s decision to credit their testimony.
Bailey, 510 F.3d at 734.
Stevenson acknowledges that a government witness
is not considered unbelievable by law merely because
of drug use, but rather only when it is either physically
impossible for the witness to have seen what she claims
to have seen or when it is impossible for the incident
to have occurred at all. Id. at 734-35; United States v.
Hayes, 236 F.3d 891, 896 (7th Cir. 2001). Having so con-
ceded, Stevenson goes on to argue that because
Quincy was not thoroughly searched, baggie fingerprints
were not obtained, and a drug-sniffing dog did not
search the car, Quincy’s testimony was “incredible.”
No. 11-2355 7
(Stevenson Brief at 15).2 These factors may point to weak-
nesses in the government’s case, but surely do not make
it impossible for the drug transactions to have occurred
or for Quincy to have seen it. And after considering
the minor weaknesses in the government’s case, the
jury still found sufficient evidence to convict beyond
a reasonable doubt.
This was not a close case where a reasonable jury
might have decided the case either way. Stevenson’s
version of events required the jurors to formulate their
own scenario to explain the otherwise odd meeting be-
tween Stevenson and Quincy in the Walgreens parking
lot, and to conclude that a crack addict would have
“leftover” crack sprinkled about the floor of the car.
The government, on the other hand, had surveillance
footage, a cooperating informant, and drugs in hand.
We would venture a guess that if the case were tried
ten times, ten juries would come to the same conclusion.
Fortunately, however, this is not the calculus we have to
2
Since we know that Quincy frequently and recently had crack
and crack paraphernalia in the car, we suspect that a drug-
sniffing dog would have alerted to crack residue in the car in
any event, and thus would not have provided much helpful
information. See United States v. Ruiz, 664 F.3d 833, 841 n.2
(10th Cir. 2012) (“Drug dogs can detect narcotics residue that
is left on objects that have come into contact with drugs, even
though no seizable quantity of drugs has been found”);
United States v. Cooks, 168 F. App’x 93, 96 (7th Cir. 2006) (rec-
ognizing that dogs may alert to drug residue even where
the drugs themselves are no longer present).
8 No. 11-2355
make. If even one rational jury could find, beyond a
reasonable doubt, that Stevenson sold crack cocaine
to Quincy, we must uphold Stevenson’s conviction
on appeal; and we do.
Stevenson also argues that the court abused its discre-
tion in sentencing him to 158 months of incarcera-
tion—eight months above the recommended guide-
lines—maintaining that the disparity between his sen-
tence and that of his business partner, Woods, who re-
ceived only 134 months, undercuts the sentencing guide-
lines’ goal of uniformity. This argument can be addressed
in short order, first, because Stevenson failed to make it
in the district court and we therefore review it for
plain error only. United States v. Peugh, 675 F.3d 736, 740
(7th Cir. 2012). Moreover, defendants who confess
guilt, plead guilty, and cooperate with an investiga-
tion simply are not similarly situated to those who force
the government to prepare for and go to trial. In other
words, a sentencing difference is “not a forbidden ‘dis-
parity’ if it is justified by legitimate considerations, such as
rewards for cooperation.” United States v. Boscarino, 437
F.3d 634, 638 (7th Cir. 2006). See also United States v.
Shamah, 624 F.3d 449, 460 (7th Cir. 2010) (noting that
although one defendant would serve much less time for
equally culpable conduct, the disparity was not inappro-
priate given the defendant’s guilty plea, cooperation
with the government, and testimony at trial against his
fellow officer”); United States v. Statham, 581 F.3d 548, 556
(7th Cir. 2009) (explaining that different members of the
conspiracy are not similarly situated where some enter
plea agreements, cooperate in the investigation, and have
No. 11-2355 9
less extensive criminal histories, and there is thus
nothing unreasonable about the fact that the sentences
they received were also different); United States v. Haynes,
582 F.3d 686, 704-05 (7th Cir. 2009) (noting that it is com-
monly understood that defendants who plead
guilty typically receive a lesser sentence than those
who do not).
Furthermore, although Stevenson does not object to
the reasonableness of the sentence in more general
terms, we note that the district court considered the
factors required by 18 U.S.C. § 3553, and ade-
quately explained its slightly above guidelines sentence,
emphasizing Stevenson’s extensive history of criminal
conduct (more than twenty other offenses), his
relatively short period of actual punishment, his use
of numerous aliases, his extremely high likelihood of
recidivism, and the audacity of dealing drugs in a public
place frequented by law-abiding citizens. Stevenson’s
sentence was not unreasonable as compared to Woods’
sentence or for any other reason.
For the reasons explained above, the decision of the
district court is affirmed.
5-14-12