United States v. Aragon

I join in full the principal opinion but write separately to underscore the legal and ethical impropriety of the form of plea bargaining that the district court perceived (correctly or not) to be at work in this case.

As I understand the principal opinion, it resolves the case in part by assuming that the district court clearly erred in finding that the parties-in order to arrive at what they viewed as a fair sentence-intentionally concealed from the court, as part of their plea bargain, a quantity of drugs that reasonably could be deemed to qualify as relevant conduct. See Op. at 1109 ("Even…