What happened
The Seventh Circuit affirmed a Central District of Illinois ruling refusing to dismiss Babajide Adefusi's wire fraud conspiracy case, holding that his earlier Southern District of Texas plea deal did not shield him from prosecution by a different U.S. Attorney's Office.
The panel said the Texas agreement was unambiguous when read as a whole, even though one paragraph referred to promises by the "United States." Paragraph 11's limiting language controlled, the court said, because the "plea agreement binds only" the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas and did not bind any other U.S. Attorney.
The dispute arose from Adefusi's 2018 guilty plea in Texas to aiding and abetting passport fraud. According to the opinion, that case involved counterfeit passports bearing his photograph but different names, bank accounts opened in the Houston area, and fraudulently obtained funds tied to internet scams.
Federal prosecutors in Illinois later charged Adefusi and others with conspiring from March to October 2018 to defraud E-MedRx, a Springfield pharmacy services and billing company. The superseding indictment alleged that conspirators caused funds meant for pharmacies to be wired to accounts they controlled, with fraudulent transfers totaling $365,467.75.
Adefusi argued the Illinois case overlapped with the earlier Texas matter and breached the Texas plea agreement's promise not to pursue additional charges arising from the passport fraud scheme. The district court rejected that argument, accepted Adefusi's conditional guilty plea and sentenced him to 24 months in prison while preserving his right to appeal the dismissal ruling.
Writing for the panel, Judge Doris L. Pryor said ordinary contract principles apply to plea agreements, but the agreement had to be read as a whole. The court rejected Adefusi's contention that two neighboring paragraphs created separate promises, one binding all U.S. Attorney's Offices and another binding only the Southern District of Texas, because that reading would make the limiting paragraph meaningless.
The panel also declined to consider extrinsic evidence, including arguments about whether one U.S. Attorney's Office could bind another without prior approval, because it found no ambiguity in the written agreement. The opinion acknowledged a circuit split over ambiguous references to "the United States" or "the government" in plea agreements, but said those nuances did not matter because Adefusi's agreement expressly limited who was bound.
The ruling leaves Adefusi's Illinois conviction in place and gives federal prosecutors within the Seventh Circuit a clear reminder that express office-specific language in a plea agreement can defeat later arguments that the deal constrained prosecutors in another district.