Third Circuit Vacates Sentence Based on Extrapolated Drug Weight

In United States v. Titus, ---F. 4th---, 2023 WL 5356241 (3d Cir. Aug. 22, 2023), the Third Circuit found that a district court erred when calculating the converted drug weight for sentencing under U.S.S.G.§ 2D1.1.  To calculate the total amount of drugs the defendant had unlawfully prescribed, the District Court extrapolated from a sample of 24 files and found thousands of additional prescriptions to be unlawful.  That analysis was insufficient, the Third Circuit held, because "the government never showed that the sample was large enough to be reliably representative of the remaining thousands of prescriptions."  The Third Circuit accordingly vacated the defendant's sentence and remanded for resentencing.