Oregon Law Review : Vol. 97, No. 1 (2018)

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Buying into Criminal Liability: Resolving the Circuit Split over the Buyer-Seller Rule in Federal Drug Conspiracy Jurisprudence
(University of Oregon School of Law, 2019-02-14) Murphy, Keegan
Imagine two similar-sounding stories. In the first, a methamphetamine dealer purchases a half ounce of product, which she gives to her husband to resell to his customers. In the second, a different methamphetamine dealer regularly purchases two ounces of product at a time from his supplier to resell to his customers. Both dealers are ultimately prosecuted for conspiring to distribute a controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act and are convicted, but the results on appeal are dramatically different. In the first scenario, the defendant’s conviction is affirmed, and she is sentenced to twelve years in prison. In the second, the defendant’s conviction is overturned because the court determines that the evidence is insufficient to convict for conspiracy, and he gets off completely scot-free. As it turns out, these scenarios and the disparity in their outcomes are more than just hypothetical—each comes from a real federal case decided during the past three years. The reason for such a dramatic difference in these cases’ outcomes is a circuit split in the interpretation of an obscure rule of federal drug conspiracy law: the buyer-seller rule.