Hobbs Act penalties: the consequences if convicted.
Twenty years per count is the headline - but Hobbs Act sentences are actually built from the robbery guideline, the § 924(c) stack, and career-offender math. The real arithmetic, and where it bends.
The statute and its twenty-year counts.
18 U.S.C. § 1951 punishes robbery and extortion that affect interstate commerce - and attempts and conspiracies at the same twenty-year maximum. The commerce hook is nearly frictionless: robbing a store that sells goods from out of state satisfies it, which is how stickups become federal cases. Each robbery is its own count, so a three-store spree is sixty years of statutory exposure before anything stacks. Extortion counts - obtaining property through fear or under color of official right - carry the same twenty and reach public-corruption fact patterns.
The real math: guidelines plus the stack.
Sentences come from § 2B3.1: base level 20, plus 2 for taking a financial institution’s property, plus 3-to-7 for weapon conduct (brandished, discharged), plus injury, abduction, and loss escalators. A single unarmed commercial robbery for a first offender lands in the 46-to-71-month band; add a brandished firearm and it climbs past seven years - before the stack. The stack is § 924(c): using or carrying a firearm during a crime of violence adds a mandatory consecutive 5 years (7 brandished, 10 discharged) on top of the robbery sentence, and a second § 924(c) count adds 25 more. Supreme Court litigation trimmed the edges - Taylor (2022) held attempted Hobbs robbery is not a § 924(c) predicate - but completed robberies still carry the full architecture. Career-offender designation (two prior crime-of-violence or drug felonies) can push guideline ranges past twenty years by itself.
Where the arithmetic bends.
Identity remains the trial defense - Hobbs cases are surveillance and cell-site cases with all the usual cross-examination. The sentencing defense is structural: fight the § 924(c) predicates (Taylor and its progeny), fight the brandishing findings, fight career-offender designations (prior-conviction categorization is a genuinely technical fight the defense wins regularly), and litigate the commerce element where the target was personal rather than commercial. Plea architecture matters more than anywhere: which counts survive, whether a 924(c) is in or out, and stipulated conduct all move the number by five-year blocks. The Hobbs Act practice here works both ends - the jury and the math.
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