United States of America v. KEON THOMAS and STYLES TAYLOR

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469
U NITED STATES OF A MERICA ,
Plaintiff‐Appellee,
v.
KEON T HOMAS and STYLES T AYLOR ,
Defendants‐Appellants.
____________________
Appeals from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Indiana, Hammond Division.
No. 01 CR 73 — James T. Moody, Judge.
____________________
A RGUED A PRIL 22, 2015 — D ECIDED J ULY 20, 2015
____________________
Before P OSNER and K ANNE , Circuit Judges, and D ARRAH ,
District Judge. *
P OSNER , Circuit Judge. In 2000 an almost totally deaf 73‐
year‐old, the federally licensed owner of a gun store in
Hammond, Indiana, was shot to death and the store robbed
of many of its guns. Taylor and Thomas, the appellants,
were indicted for the murder and robbery and in 2004 con‐
* Of the Northern District of Illinois, sitting by designation.

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2 Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469
victed by a jury of a variety of federal crimes, including
murder in the course of a robbery, and were sentenced to life
in prison. The convictions were vacated in 2011 because of a
possible violation of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986),
arising from the government’s striking a black juror in the
first trial. United States v. Taylor, 636 F.3d 901 (7th Cir. 2011).
Retried in 2012, both defendants were again convicted and
again sentenced to life imprisonment.
The defendants were drug dealers in Hammond. Their
drug dealing was not yielding them significant profits, and
they discussed robbery as a way of increasing their income.
Plaster casts of tire tracks next to the gun store, made by the
police shortly after the murder was discovered, indicated
that the tracks could have been created by Thomas’s Cadil‐
lac. And a couple of days after the murder Taylor told a 14‐
year‐old girl named Precious Walker that he and a man
named Bud White had killed the proprietor of the gun store
and taken guns from the store. Taylor made a similar confes‐
sion to a jeweler.
As a result of searches, and a seizure of guns during a
traffic stop, a number of guns stolen from the gun store dur‐
ing the robbery were traced to Taylor and Thomas. Thomas
admitted to investigators that the Cadillac that had been
used in the robbery was his, though he denied his own in‐
volvement in the murder or robbery.
At trial the government called Montrell, Taylor’s brother,
who had turned 15 shortly after the murder, as a witness.
Admitting that he would lie or die for his brother, Montrell
testified that neither Taylor nor Thomas had ever confessed
to him about being involved in the murder or robbery. But
this testimony, the government established, was contrary to

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Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469 3
testimony that Montrell had given both at the first trial and
at grand jury hearings in 2001 and 2003. Transcripts of his
earlier testimony were admitted into evidence pursuant to
Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(1), which allows the admission of a wit‐
ness’s prior inconsistent testimony given under oath.
Montrell had been interviewed by police shortly after the
murder and robbery. Asked at the second trial about the dis‐
crepancies between what he had told the officers at the in‐
terview and his current testimony, he said they’d used
threats to get him to give testimony implicating his brother
in the murder and robbery—threats such as that he would
be put in solitary confinement, or even subjected to the death
penalty, for having been involved in the robbery. He added
that only after he’d agreed to tell the interrogators what they
wanted him to tell them did they tape his statement. Yet
he’d signed a waiver of rights form, and one of the interro‐
gators testified that Montrell had not been threatened and
that the statements he made before the recording began were
generally consistent with his recorded statements. The judge
ruled that the videotape of the interrogation, which included
such statements by Montrell as that his brother had told him
that he had “hit a lick” and “had to kill the gun store man,
but I got a gank of guns,” was admissible to impeach Mon‐
trell’s testimony at the current trial.
An adult by the time of this trial, Montrell was free to tes‐
tify and did testify that he had been coerced in his initial in‐
terview back in 2001, and his lawyer was free to and did
point to the failure of the police to record the entire inter‐
view as a suspicious circumstance; for presumably had they
threatened him the threats would have preceded the admis‐
sions and they would have wanted only the admissions rec‐

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4 Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469
orded. If the statement made by Montrell was coerced and
demonstrably unreliable, and its admission in evidence in
the present case could not be found to be a harmless error,
the defendants would be entitled to a new trial. See Arizona
v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 306–12 (1991); Samuel v. Frank,
525 F.3d 566, 569 (7th Cir. 2008); Buckley v. Fitzsimmons, 20
F.3d 789, 794–95 (7th Cir. 1994). Only the argument that the
statement was coerced has any possible merit, however, and
that argument is based entirely on Montrell’s testimony,
which conflicts not only with his interrogator’s testimony
but also with sworn statements that Montrell had given be‐
fore the 2012 trial. Those statements were consistent with the
statements on the videotape and had not been coerced.
Fear of perjury charges, which Montrell claims drove him
to give sworn testimony that matched his initial interview, is
not coercion. Sawyer v. Mullaney, 510 F.2d 1220, 1221 (1st Cir.
1975); Hinton v. Uchtman, 395 F.3d 810, 822 (7th Cir. 2005)
(concurring opinion); United States v. Collazo, 798 F. Supp.
513, 518 (N.D. Ind. 1992). Otherwise a person who perjured
himself would acquire a license to repeat the perjured state‐
ment indefinitely, since for him to tell the truth would
amount to confessing to the perjury. As for the videotaped
statement that Montrell claimed had been coerced, it was
admitted only for the purpose of impeaching (that is, con‐
tradicting or undermining) his testimony at trial, and it was
consistent with other witnesses’ reports of Taylor’s confes‐
sions as well as with other evidence presented by the prose‐
cution.
Arthur Vibanco, 12 years old at the time of the robbery,
lived next door to the gun store. In their opening statements
the defendants’ lawyers told the jury that the defense would

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Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469 5
call Vibanco to testify because he had been “an eyewitness to
this crime”; that he would testify that he had seen five men
in a Cadillac enter the store, heard two shots, and seen the
men leave and get back into the Cadillac; that his description
of the Cadillac would prove that it had no connection with
either Thomas or Taylor but rather with Charles “Bud”
White; and that Thomas was not one of the men seen exiting
and later reentering the car.
Taylor’s lawyer did call Vibanco, but as a witness for the
defense he proved to be a dud. He testified to having
memory problems, and that he remembered nothing about
the crime. Yet shortly after the crime he had been inter‐
viewed by police, and the defense proposed to introduce the
police report of that interview as evidence of his description
of the Cadillac that he claimed to have seen at the scene of
the crime. The police had distributed a flyer asking the pub‐
lic whether anyone knew of a Cadillac answering to the de‐
scription that the police report attributed to Vibanco. This
was the description, it appears, to which Taylor’s lawyer
was alluding when he gave the jury his preview of Vibanco’s
testimony.
At this juncture the court recessed the trial for the night
and during the recess the prosecutor reminded Taylor’s
lawyer that his client had given the government a “proffer”
(a statement given to the government by a criminal suspect
or defendant as a possible basis for a plea agreement that
will enable him to receive a lighter sentence than if he insists
on a trial and is convicted) admitting that he was in Thom‐
as’s Cadillac at the robbery scene and knew the robbery was
taking place. The terms of the proffer permitted the prosecu‐
tion to use it against Taylor if he presented evidence incon‐

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6 Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469
sistent with it; and so if Vibanco’s description of the Cadillac
was placed in evidence by the defense the prosecution
would be allowed to use the proffer to rebut it. The defense
lawyers’ response was to ask that Vibanco’s testimony be
stricken, which it was, and to rescind their offer of the police
report of his statement.
That was not to be the last word about Vibanco. For in
closing argument the prosecutor said, without objection by
defense counsel, “I really don’t know what the defendants
were gonna talk about in their opening about Mr. Vibanco
seeing some other car there; but, obviously, that never came
to fruition. So—even Keon Thomas admitted his car was
there.” We can’t see what was objectionable in the prosecu‐
tor’s statement, and the defense did not object to it. Thomas
had indeed admitted—independently of Taylor’s proffer—
that his car was there even though he denied that he was in‐
volved in the crimes. Since the defense had claimed in its
opening statements that Vibanco had seen a car at the gun
store that was not Thomas’s, it was permissible for the pros‐
ecution to point out that the defense had offered no evidence
in support of that theory.
The defense makes much of the prosecutor’s brief exami‐
nation of Tjorra Payton, Taylor’s girlfriend at the time of the
crime. The prosecutor asked her whether shortly after the
crime she had found a gun in her laundry basket; if so it
probably had been hidden there by Taylor. She testified that
she had no recollection of it. Yet she had testified before the
grand jury that she had found the gun there. The judge re‐
fused to admit the transcript of her grand jury testimony,
which was error, because grand jury testimony is admissible
as evidence when the witness has no recollection of it. Fed.

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Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469 7
R. Evid. 801(d)(1)(A); United States v. Cooper, 767 F.3d 721,
728 (7th Cir. 2014). The government then showed her a tran‐
script of her testimony and asked her whether it refreshed
her recollection. She said it didn’t. The government pressed
her, saying “You still have no memory of finding a gun in
your hamper?” and “Do you have any memory of confront‐
ing Styles Taylor and telling him to get the gun out of your
apartment?” After she again denied any recollection, the
matter was dropped.
The defendants argue that it was improper for the gov‐
ernment to call Payton at all because it knew before the trial
began that she claimed to have no memory of the events. But
the government could call her in order to introduce her
grand jury testimony in evidence, consistently with Rule
801(d)(1)(A), as explained above, should she deny having
any recollection of that testimony.
The defendants also complain that the government in‐
sinuated that Payton had testified to the grand jury that
she’d found the gun—as indeed she had. While in other cir‐
cumstances the government’s asking Payton questions about
what she remembered of her prior statement after she said
that reviewing that statement had not refreshed her memory
would be an improper tactic because indicative of what her
prior statement had been, it was not an improper tactic in
this case because her grand jury testimony was as we said
admissible in evidence.
The son of the owner of the gun store was a Hammond
firefighter, and one of the jurors was a former fire chief of
East Chicago, which is adjacent to Hammond. Several fire‐
fighters had been among the first responders to the murder,
and one of them gave brief testimony about what he had

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8 Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469
found when he arrived. The victim’s son, who had been
summoned to the scene, also testified. There were no objec‐
tions to the testimony of the two firefighters. Nor were there
any objections to the presence, at the closing argument, of
about twenty uniformed firefighters in the audience section
of the courtroom. But after the jury returned the guilty ver‐
dicts, defense counsel moved for a new trial on the ground
that the presence of the uniformed firefighters had deprived
the defendants of a fair trial.
The judge denied the motion. He was justified in doing
so, quite apart from the failure of the defendants to have
made a timely objection to the presence of the firefighters,
though the defendants (and their counsel) were aware of
their presence. The prosecutor had made no reference to the
firefighters in closing argument. Nor is there any suggestion
that they fidgeted, made faces, or in any way disrupted the
trial, impaired its decorum, or detracted from its gravity. It is
not suggested that their presence was a prosecutorial ploy,
or that they were present for any reason other than that the
murder victim had been the father of one of them. And for
all we know the only reason they were wearing their uni‐
forms was that they were taking a brief break from duty to
hear the closing arguments. Defense counsel do not even tell
us how large the courtroom is, how many spectators it seats,
and what fraction of the audience consisted of the uniformed
firefighters.
The defendants haven’t made a case for intimidation or
improper influence of the jury. As pointed out in Smith v.
Farley, 59 F.3d 659, 664 (7th Cir. 1995), “if you kill a police‐
man and are put on trial for the crime, you must expect the
courtroom audience to include policemen,” and if one re‐

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Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469 9
places “policeman” with “firefighter’s father” and “police‐
men” with “firefighters,” this case involves a similar expec‐
tation. In Smith we upheld the defendant’s death sentence,
and in Carey v. Musladin, 549 U.S. 70, 77 (2006), the Supreme
Court ruled that it had not violated the defendant’s right to a
fair trial for the court to have allowed members of the vic‐
tim’s family to attend the trial while wearing buttons dis‐
playing the victim’s picture. It’s true that in Woods v. Dugger,
923 F.2d 1454, 1458–59 (11th Cir. 1991), the defendant’s mur‐
der conviction was overturned in part because of the num‐
ber of uniformed prison guards who attended the trial, but
the decision was also based on the fact that the victim was a
prison guard killed while on duty, that there was extensive
pretrial publicity about dangers to prison guards, and that
several jurors had relatives employed in the prison system.
We turn now to the defendants’ challenges to their sen‐
tences of life imprisonment. (As in United States v. Vance, 764
F.3d 667, 676–77 (7th Cir. 2014), the judge in this case im‐
posed a term of supervised release on the defendants, which
since supervised release doesn’t begin until the defendant is
released from prison will become moot if they die in prison,
as they will unless their lifetime prison sentences are com‐
muted.) Among other things they contest the judge’s adding
two guideline levels for their having attacked a “vulnerable
victim.” U.S.S.G. § 3A1.1(b)(1). The government points out
that because the defendants’ guideline score was the maxi‐
mum, 43, without the enhancement, and life imprisonment
is recommended for convicted defendants having such a
score, the enhancement is unlikely to have affected their sen‐
tence. But it could have. A recommendation is not a com‐
mand, and so a lower score might have influenced the
judge’s choice of sentence. There is also the possibility, re‐

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10 Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469
mote though it may be, of either a successful bid for a post‐
conviction remedy or a pardon. (The possibility that a life
sentence based on a guidelines score of 43 might be convert‐
ed to a sentence of years were there no basis for
a vulnerable‐victim or other enhancement suggests a need to
reexamine cases such as United States v. Fletcher, 763 F.3d
711, 717–18 (7th Cir. 2014), that have held that a guideline
error is harmless if it doesn’t affect the defendant’s guideline
range.)
A defendant, to be given the vulnerable‐victim enhance‐
ment, must have been, or at least should have been, aware of
his victim’s vulnerability. U.S.S.G. § 3A1.1(b)(1) (”knew or
should have known that a victim of the offense was a vul‐
nerable victim”). The defendants argue that they didn’t
know their victim was deaf and wore a pacemaker (though
the relevance of the pacemaker to his vulnerability is un‐
clear), and that they shot him merely because he reached for
a gun, and would have done so whatever his age or impair‐
ments. But as is apparent from the language of the guideline
authorizing the enhancement, the crime need not have been
motivated by the victim’s vulnerability. The judge was enti‐
tled to find that the defendants probably did know, and cer‐
tainly should have known, of their victim’s vulnerability,
and that’s enough for the enhancement. The gun store they
entered was not the only one in Hammond, and they may
have picked it because they were aware of the owner’s vul‐
nerability. As soon as they entered they would have seen
that he was elderly, and they may well have noticed that he
didn’t hear them enter because, although the door had a
loud electronic buzzer connected to it, he couldn’t hear it,
because of his deafness.

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Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469 11
The judge gave both defendants a guideline enhance‐
ment for obstruction of justice, and Taylor challenges his en‐
hancement on this appeal. The challenge fails. He obstructed
justice by threatening a witness (Precious Walker)—he con‐
fessed the crime to her and told her he’d kill her if she told
anyone.
By way of further challenge to their sentences the de‐
fendants argue that they had had such awful upbringings,
which jointly with their personal characteristics were re‐
sponsible for their criminality, that they should have been
given shorter sentences. Taylor asked the judge to impose a
sentence of 25 years on him, which because he’s been im‐
prisoned since his arrest in 2000 would entitle him to be re‐
leased in 10 years (less if he gets time off for good behavior),
when he will be about to turn 45. Thomas requested a sen‐
tence of 30 years, which would entitle him to be released in
15 years, when he’ll be almost 56. And upon release the de‐
fendants will face five years of supervised release, restricting
their conduct and precipitating revocation and a prison sen‐
tence should they disobey any of the conditions of super‐
vised release.
In sentencing each defendant to life imprisonment the
judge recited just boilerplate—that a lower than guidelines
sentence, “as requested by the defendant, is just not war‐
ranted under the facts and circumstances of this case. … This
sentence reflects the seriousness of the offenses, promotes
respect for the law, and provides just punishment for these
crimes. It is sufficient but not greater than necessary to hold
this defendant accountable for his criminal conduct.” See 18
U.S.C. § 3553(a). And so on in this vein. The judge said noth‐
ing about the history and characteristics of either defendant.

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12 Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469
This was a potentially serious omission because a sentencing
judge’s failure to address a defendant’s substantial argument
for mitigation of his sentence can require resentencing, see,
e.g., United States v. Gary, 613 F.3d 706, 709 (7th Cir. 2010),
though the emphasis falls on “substantial.”
Taylor had been born in 1980 to an unmarried woman
who did not want to have a child. When pregnant with him
she indulged in heavy drinking and consumption of mariju‐
ana and cocaine, and drank rum with quinine capsules in
order to kill the fetus. Obviously he survived, but he was
born three months early, weighing only about three and a
half pounds. His mother made clear that she cared only
about her other children, beat him gratuitously, blew mari‐
juana smoke in his face to calm him down, and abandoned
him for long periods. An aunt beat him routinely, including
with extension cords and belts—instruments also used by
his mother to beat him. He bore scars from the beatings. His
mother abused him verbally as well, calling him “little son of
a bitch,” “little motherfucker,” and “bastard” (which literally
he was, but that wasn’t the sense in which his mother was
using the word). Throughout his childhood his mother
smoked crack cocaine and consumed quantities of cocaine,
marijuana, and alcohol, as well, including in his presence.
Her home—which was his home—was a well‐known site for
gambling and prostitution.
Left largely to himself, Taylor by the age of four was be‐
ing used by adults to help them commit burglaries. Teenag‐
ers in the neighborhood introduced him to gambling and
drug dealing when he was eight years old. A different aunt,
and his grandmother, made valiant efforts to take care of
him but both were dead of cancer by the time he was in his

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Nos. 13‐2814, 13‐3469 13
teens. He was a terrible student, with cognitive difficulties
that may have been related to his mother’s heavy drinking
during her pregnancy. At age 11 he was convicted of burgla‐
ry, at 16 of armed robbery, and at 18 of possession of illegal
drugs, though he was jailed for only two days for the drug
offense. He was as we said 19 when he participated in the
murder of the gun store’s owner and the robbery of the
store’s guns.
The facts regarding Taylor’s personal history, if true
(they have not yet been submitted to full evidentiary proce‐
dure), are possible grounds for mitigation—for reducing his
sentence from life to a term of years. For they suggest that
external forces beyond his ability to control created cognitive
and psychological impairments that greatly diminished his
ability to resist engaging in serious criminal activity. When
substantial grounds for mitigation are presented, the sen‐
tencing judge must explain his reasons for rejecting them,
see, e.g., United States v. Morris, 775 F.3d 882, 886–88 (7th Cir.
2015), and this the judge failed to do. The government agrees
that Taylor’s sentence must therefore be vacated and the
case remanded for resentencing. Although Thomas’s up‐
bringing was not as awful as Taylor’s, it was similar enough
to persuade the government that he too is entitled to be re‐
sentenced. In all other respects (including rulings that we
have not discussed because the defendants’ challenges to
them are plainly devoid of merit) the judgments are af‐
firmed.
A FFIRMED IN P ART , R EVERSED IN P ART , AND R EMANDED

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