United States of America v. Benjamin Biancofiori

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 21-3372
U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
BENJAMIN BIANCOFIORI ,
Defendant-Appellant.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 16 CR 306-1 — Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge.
____________________
S UBMITTED F EBRUARY 26, 2024 — DECIDED F EBRUARY 28, 2024
____________________
Before SYKES , Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and S T. EVE,
Circuit Judges.
EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. A jury convicted Benjamin
Biancofiori of sex trafficking by force, in violation of 18 U.S.C.
§1591, and he was sentenced to 360 months in prison plus su-
pervised release for life. The evidence permitted the jury to
find that, between 2007 and 2016, Biancofiori compelled nine
adult women to engage in prostitution, beating them if they
tried to escape or failed to hand over their receipts. Details do

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2 No. 21-3372
not matter for current purposes. We address in this opinion
Biancofiori’s contention that §1591 covers only the sex traf-
ficking of minors or is unconstitutional. We address his other
appellate arguments in a non-precedential order released
contemporaneously.
Section 1591(a) reads:
Sex trafficking of children or by force, fraud, or coercion
(a) Whoever knowingly—
(1) in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, or within
the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United
States, recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides, obtains,
advertises, maintains, patronizes, or solicits by any means a
person; or
(2) benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value, from
participation in a venture which has engaged in an act de-
scribed in violation of paragraph (1),
knowing, or, except where the act constituting the violation of
paragraph (1) is advertising, in reckless disregard of the fact, that
means of force, threats of force, fraud, coercion described in sub-
section (e)(2), or any combination of such means will be used to
cause the person to engage in a commercial sex act, or that the
person has not attained the age of 18 years and will be caused to
engage in a commercial sex act, shall be punished as provided in
subsection (b).
The trailing paragraph makes trafficking of a minor an alter-
native to trafficking of “a person” by “force, threats of force,
fraud, coercion … or any combination of such means”. Either
trafficking through force or trafficking a minor suffices. And
if there were doubt (which there is not), the caption—“traf-
ficking of children or by force” (emphasis added)—shows that
the language of the trailing paragraph is not some kind of gar-
ble. A statute’s caption cannot diminish the scope of the

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No. 21-3372 3
statute’s text, see Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., 542
U.S. 241, 256 (2004), but it can show that the text means what
it appears to say, as this caption does. The text and caption
together are sufficiently clear that it would be unwarranted to
consider legislative history.
Biancofiori insists that this straightforward reading of the
statute produces absurd results by penalizing the sex traffick-
ing of adults more harshly than the sex trafficking of minors.
Under subsection (b)(2), to which subsection (a) refers, the
minimum sentence for sex trafficking of a minor is 10 years’
imprisonment, while subsection (b)(1) provides for a 15-year
minimum sentence when the defendant traffics any person by
force. We have two reactions.
First, we do not see any incongruity in providing that us-
ing force increases the minimum sentence. Congress did not
take leave of its senses in providing that trafficking an 18-
year-old girl by beatings and other physical terror is more se-
rious than trafficking a 17-year-old girl without force.
Second, Biancofiori supposes that judges should use their
own ideas of what is absurd or strange to override an explicit
statutory text. We held in Jaskolski v. Daniels, 427 F.3d 456, 461–
62 (7th Cir. 2005); United States v. Logan, 453 F.3d 804, 806 (7th
Cir. 2006), affirmed, 552 U.S. 23 (2007); Spivey v. Vertrue, Inc.,
528 F.3d 982, 984–85 (7th Cir. 2008); and Soppet v. Enhanced Re-
covery Co., 679 F.3d 637 (7th Cir. 2012), that only linguistic ab-
surdity permits a corrective intervention; substantive matters
are for the legislature whether or not a judge finds the choice
hard to swallow. As we put it in Soppet, 679 F.3d at 642:
“[A]djudication is not the continuation of legislation by other
means.”

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4 No. 21-3372
We could not find any appellate decision holding that
§1591(a) is limited to the sex trafficking of minors. Nor could
we find any precedential opinion holding the opposite,
though United States v. Cook, 782 F.3d 983 (8th Cir. 2015), is
close. But the argument has been made frequently in district
courts, and at least one district judge bought it. United States
v. Afyare, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86587 (M.D. Tenn. June 12,
2013), reversed, 632 Fed. App’x 272 (6th Cir. 2016). Although
the Sixth Circuit did not issue a precedential decision—appar-
ently believing the issue too clear for reasonable debate, see
632 Fed. App’x at 275–79—the fact that a patter of arguments
similar to Biancofiori’s continues in the district courts implies
the need to resolve the matter with precedential effect.
Biancofiori’s fallback is that §1591(a) is unconstitutionally
vague. For the reasons we have given, however, the statute’s
rule is well-defined. Biancofiori’s argument relies on state-
ments in the legislative history, not on the statutory language.
Many a statement by many a legislator is vague, or does not
match the enacted statute, but that does not render invalid an
enacted text whose meaning is ascertainable. We do not per-
ceive any other plausible constitutional argument against the
statute’s application to Biancofiori.
A FFIRMED

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