Here is the opinion in United States v. Latone — US v Latone
An excerpt:
The Court has carefully considered the arguments of counsel and the record before the Court. Latone’s record does not appear substantially different from that of other offenders off the state’s reservations with a criminal history category of 1, and so the Court will deny the upward departure that the United States requests. The [Zuni] tribal court gave a few days or community service as punishment for the tribal convictions, and the tribal court did not treat those offenses as seriously as the United States now requests the Court to do. The Court is reluctant to treat the prior offenses more seriously than did the tribal court. The Court thinks these prior convictions provide little indication how Latone will act in the future, because he has not received a sentence of long duration before this case. With the sentence in this case, he may act very differently in the future. Further, only two of his prior convictions — both simple assaults — were crimes of violence. See PSR PP 35, 37, at 10-11. Moreover, the Court is reluctant to treat the juvenile offenses before the tribal court more seriously than it does non-tribal juvenile counts. There does not appear to be a good reason in this case to vary from the Guidelines’ good judgment that the Court generally should not consider juvenile and tribal convictions in sentencing. There is little or no information about some of the tribal convictions, and therefore there is no reliable information to indicate that Latone’s criminal history is substantially underrepresented.
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