## Facts

- Two men, Lamar E. Sanders and Ralph Scott, forced their way into Timicka Nobles’s apartment in Portage, Indiana, as she prepared to leave for work; Nobles’s 10-year-old daughter, R.E., was present.
- Scott held R.E. hostage while Sanders, at gunpoint, directed Nobles to go to her mother’s currency exchange in Chicago, remove money from a safe, and complete a drop-off, warning that compliance would prevent harm.
- Nobles left to carry out the plan but covertly alerted her mother and law enforcement; police set up surveillance for the drop.
- Scott arrived at or near the drop location in Sanders’s car and was arrested; Sanders fled but later turned himself in.
- Officers recovered Sanders’s driver’s license and photographs from the car; at the drop location, officers showed Nobles one or two photos, and she identified Sanders as the fleeing man.
- About two hours later, Nobles and R.E. separately viewed a six-photo array with Sanders and five similar fillers; both independently identified Sanders.
- Before trial, Sanders moved to suppress Nobles’s identifications (on-scene photos, photo array, and anticipated in-court identification) as impermissibly suggestive and unreliable; the district court denied the motion and admitted the identifications.
- After a jury trial, Sanders was convicted of kidnapping (18 U.S.C. § 1201) and extortion (18 U.S.C. § 1951) and sentenced to concurrent terms of 25 years (kidnapping) and 20 years (extortion), based on a 25-year mandatory minimum under 18 U.S.C. § 3559(f)(2).

## Issues

1. Whether admitting Nobles’s on-scene identification, later photo-array identification, and in-court identification violated due process because the procedures were impermissibly suggestive and unreliable.
2. Whether limiting Sanders’s cross-examination of Nobles violated the Confrontation Clause or constituted an abuse of evidentiary discretion.
3. Whether the sentencing court erred by applying the 25-year mandatory minimum in 18 U.S.C. § 3559(f)(2) rather than a 20-year minimum associated with 18 U.S.C. § 1201(g), including whether ambiguity required the rule of lenity.

## Decision

- The Seventh Circuit affirmed the convictions and sentence.
- The court held that the identification procedures did not create a constitutionally unacceptable risk of misidentification and that the identifications were sufficiently reliable under the totality of the circumstances.
- The court held that the limits placed on cross-examination were reasonable and did not deprive Sanders of an adequate opportunity to test the witness’s credibility.
- The court held that the 25-year mandatory minimum in § 3559(f)(2) applied to the child-kidnapping conviction and that statutory canons and the rule of lenity did not require a lower minimum.

## Legal Principles

- A due process challenge to identification evidence proceeds by asking (1) whether the procedure was impermissibly suggestive due to law-enforcement arrangement and, if so, (2) whether the identification was nevertheless reliable under the totality of the circumstances.
- Suggestiveness alone does not require exclusion; the constitutional concern is a substantial likelihood of irreparable misidentification, assessed using reliability factors such as opportunity to view, degree of attention, accuracy of description, certainty, and time between event and identification.
- The Confrontation Clause guarantees an opportunity for effective cross-examination, not unlimited cross-examination; trial courts may impose reasonable limits based on relevance, prejudice, confusion, or cumulative presentation if the jury still has enough information to assess credibility.
- In construing overlapping sentencing statutes, courts read related provisions together where possible and apply clear statutory text; the rule of lenity applies only when, after ordinary interpretive tools, a grievous ambiguity remains.

## Conclusion

The Seventh Circuit upheld Sanders’s convictions and concurrent sentences, concluding that the eyewitness identifications were admissible and reliable, the trial court’s cross-examination limits were constitutionally and evidentially permissible, and § 3559(f)(2) required a 25-year mandatory minimum for the child-kidnapping offense.


United States v. Sanders, 708 F.3d 976 (7th Cir. 2013)