Joshua Bevill
Joshua writes in his own words on struggle, growth and finding hope at www.thejoshuabevillprisondiaries.com
Click here to read Joshua's article about how the federal government uses uncharged crimes and acquitted crimes to imprison people.
We invite you to read Bevill’s full Clemency brief.
U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Run Amok
In federal court, the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines drive an offender's sentence. The chart starts at level 1 and goes as high as level 43, life in prison without the possibility of parole, or death by Imprisonment, extreme punishment reserved for irredeemable offenders such as terrorists and people who traffic very young children for the use of pornography. Or is it?
Joshua Bevill's U.S. Sentencing Guideline score was life in prison without the possibility of parole. As a result, he received a statutory maximum sentence of 90 years, 30 years to be served. But he's not a terrorist or a child trafficker.
Joshua Bevill committed a relatively minor (low-level) white-collar offense: he made misrepresentations to three high-net-worth investors, causing a combined loss of $106,000—that's $106 thousand, not $106 million.
How The Court Added Decades to Joshua Bevill's Sentence in his 2011 Case Based on Entirely Separate Uncharged Unrelated 2004 Crimes that Allegedly Occurred Many Years Before Joshua's 2011 Crime of Conviction
On the surface, it appears as though Joshua received 30 years in federal prison because he perpetrated a multimillion-dollar fraud against more than 100 investors/victims. But the truth is in the details. We characterize Joshua's case as a jackpot because it is a prime example of how federal sentencing can careen out of control and produce an outrageous, disproportionately harsh, punitive sentence that spans decades and has little to no connection to the seriousness and harm of the offense.
In Joshua's present 2011 securities fraud case, under his company Progressive Investment Partners, he made misrepresentations to 3 high-net-worth investor/victims, causing a combined loss of $106,000, a relatively minor nonviolent offense that yielded a U.S. Sentencing Guidelines range of about 24 to 36 months in prison.
At his sentencing hearing, Joshua was blindsided. (In federal court, the Probation Department prepares a Presentence Investigation Report, which yields the defendant's sentencing range.)
In particular, in the Presentence Report regarding Joshua's 2011 crime of conviction, which the judge adopted, the Probation Department maintained that years before, in 2004, when Joshua was about twenty-three years old, he worked for an unrelated company called The Pointer Group. The owners of The Pointer Group, Bill Fuqua and Roy Prichard, hired Bevill as a low-level salesman.
Moreover, the Probation Department maintained that in 2004 The Pointer Group committed fraud when its salesforce raised $2.7 million from 63 investors.
By hitching the $2.7 million loss amount + 63 investors/victims from the uncharged unrelated 2004 Pointer Group crimes to the $106,000 loss amount + 3 investors/victims in Bevill's 2011 case, it caused Bevill's sentencing range to balloon from 24 to 36 months to 30 years to life in prison without parole—the bigger the fraud, the longer the prison sentence. As such, Joshua was crushed with 30 years in federal prison.
With the flick of a pen, Joshua's 2011 conviction for a $106,000 securities fraud that merited a few years in prison was turned into a multimillion-dollar fraud that resulted in three decades, without parole, in federal prison.
Even though the government swears up and down that the owners (Bill and Roy) of The Pointer Group made millions committing fraud, they were never charged with any of those crimes, nor was Joshua. Yet Joshua's 2011 crime of conviction for a $106,000 securities fraud that involved 3 investors/victims was the vehicle to punish Joshua for entirely separate, unrelated 2004 crimes that he was never charged with, tried for, or convicted of. Let that radical concept sink in.
The Uncharged Pointer Group Crimes
Here's a little background. In 2004, Tracy Pool, who owned Reunion Resources, furnished the owners of The Pointer Group (Bill and Roy) with oil and gas projects to fund. Thus, in 2004 The Pointer Group's salesforce raised $2.7 million from 63 investors. Upon raising the money, the owners of The Pointer Group sent the funds to Tracy Pool, who was supposed to invest the money. Unbeknown to The Pointer Group, Pool spent much of the money on personal expenses rather than investing it.
As a result, the investors sued Pool. During the civil case, under oath, Pool did not dodge responsibility but candidly admitted that when The Pointer Group sent him the investors' money, he made them believe he invested it, but he spent it on himself. Using Pool's confession in the civil case, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into Pool. Pool became a cooperating government witness by helping the government prosecute others associated with his various frauds but maintained that The Pointer Group and Joshua (who was a low-level Pointer Group employee) did not know about his fraud.
But what does the alleged uncharged Pointer Group crimes from 2004 have to do with Joshua's 2011 case? Nothing.
If you're confused, you should be.
In federal court, there is a dangerous legal loophole the courts exploit and pervert, which allows courts to convict defendants of one relatively minor crime only to add many years and even decades to their sentences for entirely separate uncharged, untried crimes—a shady practice that many in the legal community have denounced.
As such, Joshua was convicted of a relatively minor 2011 crime, but his sentence was inflated by decades based on entirely separate crimes that he was never charged with, tried for, or convicted of—uncharged crimes the government claims occurred some 5 to 6 years before his 2011 case even began. Simply put as was touched on earlier, Joshua's conviction for a relatively minor 2011 securities fraud was the vehicle to punish him for millions regarding unrelated 2004 crimes that he was never charged with, much less convicted of.
Think of it like this. A person robs a bank with a note. As such, he's convicted of bank robbery. He gets away with $300. No violence. No threats. So he's looking at a few years in prison. Now suppose at sentencing the government maintains that 5 years before the bank robbery (the crime of conviction), the defendant robbed a convenience store, murdering the clerk in the process.
So at the sentencing for the relatively minor bank robbery, the judge actually uses the characteristics of the uncharged robbery in which the store clerk was killed to sentence the accused to 30 years in prison. This allows the government to use the relatively minor bank robbery as a vehicle to indirectly imprison the accused for the unrelated stale botched robbery that resulted in a murdered store clerk—no arrest, no indictment, no trial by jury, no beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard.
With that, a person can walk into a federal sentencing hearing after having been convicted of one relatively minor crime that merits a few years in prison; however, he leaves the courthouse with decades in prison based on entirely different additional crimes that allegedly occurred many years prior, crimes he was never even charged with.
Additionally, here are some critical facts about Joshua's involvement with uncharged The Pointer Group crimes, which were undisputed by the government:
At twenty-three years old, Joshua only worked at The Pointer Group for 3 months as a low-level salesman, with no managerial duties or control.
As a low-level salesman, Joshua's take was less than 1 percent of the total $2.7 million raised by The Pointer Group.
Most of the $2.7 million was raised by The Pointer Group after Joshua had left the company.
Cooperating government witness Tracy Pool testified under oath in the civil case that he carried out the fraud without the knowledge of The Pointer Group and Joshua.
Even though at Joshua's sentencing, the government insisted that owners of The Pointer Group were in on the fraud and made a cool million dollars, the government never charged them with a crime—they did not cooperate with the government but steadfastly maintained their innocence.
The "evidence" to support the finding that Joshua was responsible for the entire $2.7 million in losses + 63 investor/victims was the uncorroborated, unsworn, untested out-of-court hearsay from someone who said that after Joshua left The Pointer Group and after The Pointer Group raised the $2.7 million, he told Joshua that it was really a scam because Pool wasn't investing the money. Bevill supposedly shrugged it off, saying, "I don't care. I just want to make money."
When investors sued Pool for the $2.7 million, Joshua was not involved in the civil case—he was neither questioned nor deposed.
Outside of the superficial similarity that both involved oil and gas projects, there was no relationship between Joshua's 2011 case (Progressive Investment Partners) and the uncharged 2004 (The Pointer Group) crimes; that is, no one—accomplices nor investor/victims—involved in The Pointer Group were involved in Joshua's Progressive Investment Partners company.
When one considers that it was not Joshua's actual crime of conviction in his relatively minor 2011 case that drove his 30-year prison sentence, but rather the millions tied to the uncharged 2004 crimes, coupled with the details of Joshua's limited involvement with The Pointer Group, Joshua's 30-year sentence grossly overstates the seriousness of his crime.
Tellingly, even federal prosecutors believed this was unfair—so much so that based purely on the 3553 sentencing factors, prosecutors asked Joshua's judge to depart from Joshua's sentencing range of 30 years to life in prison down to a sentence of 10 years. In doing so, prosecutors emphasized imprisoning Joshua for longer than 10 years would be purely punitive and serve no useful purpose. Rather, imprisoning him for 30 years would serve only one very illegitimate and cruel purpose: to unfairly warehouse a man—who does not need to be warehoused—for the sake of warehousing him.
In support of their position, prosecutors argued that given Joshua's crime of conviction is relatively minor, combined with his background and characteristics, 10 years in prison was plenty for Joshua, underscoring that Joshua was not likely to re-offend after serving 10 years.
Some of The Most Highly Regarded Legal Minds in The Nation, Denounce as Well As Call Unconstitutional the Shady Practice of Using Crimes A Defendant Was Never Charged With, Tried For, or Convicted of to Imprison People
We denounce countries like Russia for their unfair system of justice. Sure, the American federal justice system masks the realities in ways that obscure injustice with a veneer of pseudo-process and procedure, putting a phony gloss of reliability on the proceedings. But the proceedings are one-sided, superficial, and hollow, in which the result is baked into the process. And that's the beauty of it.
Speaking out against this practice, Judge Lay for the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals pointed out, "If the former Soviet Union or a third world country had permitted [sentencing based on uncharged crimes], human rights observers would condemn those countries." More recently, then-U.S. Court of Appeals judge, now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh echoed that sentiment: "Allowing judges to rely on...uncharged conduct to impose a higher sentence than they otherwise would impose seems a dubious infringement of the rights of due process and jury trial." Kavanaugh added, "If you have a right to have a jury find beyond a reasonable doubt the facts that make you guilty, and if you otherwise would receive, for example, a five-year sentence, why don't you have a right to have a jury find a beyond a reasonable doubt the facts that increase that five-year sentence to, say, a 20-year sentence." U.S. v. Bell, 803 F.3d 926, 928 (D.C. Circuit 2015).
Similarly, when now U.S. Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch was an Appeals Court Judge for the Tenth Circuit, he questioned the constitutionality of this practice, pointing out, "Known as relevant conduct, judge-found facts which often include uncharged and even acquitted conduct driving federal sentences, often increasing terms of imprisonment by years and even decades."
In 2007, in Jones v. United States, four U.S. Supreme Court Justices were fed up with the practice of allowing the government to convict a defendant of one relatively minor crime only to base his punishment primarily on entirely separate uncharged crimes or other uncharged criminal conduct—and so they wanted to outlaw the practice as unconstitutional. There, they made this emphatic statement: "The Court of Appeals have uniformly taken our [The Supreme Court] continuing silence to suggest that the Constitution does permit unreasonable sentences supported by judicial fact-finding, so long as they were within the statutory range." The court added, "This has gone on long enough." (Emphasis added.)
However, the majority in the high court refused to take on the issue. But that was quite a while ago. With three new Supreme Court Justices—Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Jackson—having been appointed since then who have spoken out against the practice, the Supreme Court might have the votes if the issue is revisited.
In a 2017 Supreme Court case, Nelson v. Colorado, the court emphasized the paramount importance of the presumption of innocence in the American justice system. There, the Court asked how the government can use separate uncharged crimes as a vehicle to add additional punishment to the crime of conviction if, in this country, our system of justice says the criminally accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The court there issued a ruling that some scholars say actually stands for the proposition that entirely separate uncharged, untried crimes cannot be used to enhance the sentence of a separate crime of conviction.
The nation's most highly regarded legal scholars have also weighed in on the issue. Allan Ellis, a national expert on federal sentencing law, and Mark Allenbaugh, former sentencing commission lawyer, explained, in an interview with The News, that the relevant conduct loophole is "an end run around the Constitution." "Defendants don't realize this when they go to trial or plead guilty." He added, "If the evidence is strong enough, the government should charge the defendant with a crime and let the jury decide rather than slip it in during sentencing."
When Ohio State Law Professor/legal scholar Douglas Berman explained this concept to his class, he said that his students thought he was playing a joke on them. I think that says it all. Berman himself has shed light on this unfair practice in detailed studies. The list of highly regarded people in the legal community who denounce this practice goes on and on; there are far too many to note here.
Injustice wears many faces. It's not always black and white. Rather, it can be subtle. This brand of injustice is particularly insidious.
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Joshua Bevill #96054-080
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About Joshua Bevill
Joshua grew up in McKinney, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Growing up, Joshua excelled at school and sports. Joshua lived and breathed sports, playing year-round.
While Joshua and his two sisters were young, his mother was a secretary at Bell Helicopter and attended night school to obtain a nursing degree. She eventually worked her way up to a hospital director in McKinney. Joshua's mother and stepfather raised him when his biological parents divorced when he was five. His stepfather was a Marine turned police officer turned detective for the railroad. His biological father, Gary, was a small business owner focused on auto repair. Gary is a pilot, a preacher from time to time at Trinity Lighthouse Church in Denison, Texas, was the Chaplain for the Denison Police Department, and much more—fully immersed in the Church and community outreach.
Joshua had a stable, middle-class upbringing in a healthy household focused on goals and discipline, with plenty of love and support.
Joshua spent his summers playing baseball for all-star teams in tournaments all over Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. During Joshua's senior year in high school, he was statistically one of the best offensive baseball players in North Texas, as each week, the Dallas Morning News published a list of the top offensive players (i.e., batting average and home runs) in North Texas; Joshua was consistently ranked in the top 3.
In his late teens, Joshua began to binge drink. Between the ages of 17 and 22, his binge drinking led to poor decision making, which resulted in some scrapes with the law. In a March 1, 2012 Sentencing Memorandum, federal prosecutors characterized Joshua's criminal history as "relatively minor crimes that the Defendant committed between ages 17 and 22."
About four years ago—the now 43-year-old Joshua also became involved in the Word of God for the first time in prison. Cultivating a daily, intimate relationship with Christ has become central to Joshua’s lifestyle, not merely an event every Sunday. If you don't know this about Joshua, then you don't know Joshua. Joshua mentors other prisoners dealing with addiction, depression, and other emotional and psychological problems that inevitably spring up during a prison term. He also encourages fellow prisoners to learn about and cultivate a meaningful relationship with Christ.
Joshua has an extensive library of Christian books he's read while in prison, which he loans to other prisoners. Through a friend, he even publishes online Christian book reviews. Joshua's favorite pastor is Tony Evans of Oak Cliff Bible Church in Dallas. Joshua also studies many of the late Zane Hodges' works, one of Evans’ old professors at Dallas Theological Center.
But Joshua's primary source is the bible itself. Notably, from prison, Joshua has also written extensively about living an authentic Christian life, how it can combat and cure addiction, depression, and much more. These posts are currently published online.
Joshua also cultivates a lifelong passion for nutrition science and fitness. Additionally, Joshua spends time researching to write and publish online articles for The Justice Project, a legal advocacy group in Austin/Dallas/Houston. He's written more than 40 online articles. What's more, Joshua has spent the last decade-plus immersed in every facet of federal sentencing law and spends a considerable amount of time helping other prisoners identify and articulate their legal arguments, as prisoners do not have a right to an attorney during the post-conviction stage and almost no prisoner can afford an attorney at that point.
Joshua has facilitated the release of different prisoners by helping them construct cogent arguments that resulted in a court granting relief. Notably, most prisoners lack basic education, making it very difficult for them to pinpoint and litigate complex legal issues, so Joshua helps them with this laborious and tedious task.
Noteworthy as well, while in prison, Joshua lived in a special housing unit designated for the Mentor/Mentee program. There, Joshua was required to program all day and even some at night and mentor other prisoners. What's more, Joshua was an Inmate Care Assistant at the prison hospital at Fort Worth Medical Center. As part of his job duties, he helped elderly, terminally ill, and sick inmates carry out daily tasks, working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week.
Beyond all this, this year (2023) alone, Joshua is on track to complete more than 15 classes, some of which span weeks or months. In all, Joshua has completed hundreds of hours of programs, having taken a very long list of courses the prison offers, including the 40-hour drug treatment course.
Over the last eight years, Joshua has maintained a near-perfect prison disciplinary record. He also works a daily prison job as an orderly.
In sum, Joshua has made extensive rehabilitative efforts. But, more importantly, no prison progress report can capture Joshua's investment in his relationship with Christ and the daily time spent in God's Word, which has led to a radical character transformation and marked behavior changes that cannot be reduced to a progress report.
For a low-level, nonviolent crime, Joshua must serve 30 years in federal prison, a system that does not offer parole. He's about to start his 14th year in prison. To paraphrase and borrow the words that federal prosecutor Alan Buie spoke to Joshua's sentencing judge, "Given the nature of Joshua's nonviolent, low-level offense, coupled with his specific background and character, it would not serve a valid purpose to imprison Joshua for more than 10 years; and to imprison him for 25 years would be senseless and purely punitive, only serving to unfairly warehouse Joshua, who is neither a danger to the public nor likely to re-offend."
Translation: Joshua does not need to sit in a cage for three decades to accomplish the goals of sentencing.
