Opinion ID: 2974958
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Husein’s family circumstances

Text: The government correctly notes that even though the Guidelines are no longer mandatory, sentencing courts still must consider “any pertinent policy statement” contained therein. See 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(5). And, to be sure, § 5H1.6 is one such statement. It provides in pertinent part that “family ties and responsibilities are not ordinarily relevant in determining whether a departure may be warranted.” U.S.S.G. § 5H1.6. This, in turn, makes family circumstances a “discouraged” factor under the Guidelines. See Koon, 518 U.S. at 95 (“Discouraged factors . . . are those not ordinarily relevant to the determination of whether a sentence should be outside the applicable guideline range.”) (quotation marks omitted). But this policy statement alone does not render the district court’s decision to grant Husein a downward departure based on family circumstances an abuse of discretion. Booker in part accounts for why. As the First Circuit recently explained: Under the Guidelines, courts are discouraged from taking family circumstances into account, see U.S.S.G. § 5H1.6, and before Booker the court would have been unlikely to take them into account in imposing sentence. After Booker, however, the fact that a factor is discouraged or forbidden under the guidelines does not automatically make it irrelevant when a court is weighing statutory factors apart from the guidelines. No. 05-2548 United States v. Husein Page 6 United States v. Aitoro, 446 F.3d 246, 255 n.9 (1st Cir. 2006); see also United States v. Davis, 458 F.3d 491, 498 (6th Cir. 2006) (noting that “[i]n an appropriate case, a trial court . . . has a freer hand to account for” a factor disapproved of by the Sentencing Commission’s policy statements.) Nevertheless, when a district court departs downward on the basis of a discouraged factor such as family circumstances, those circumstances must be “exceptional.” Koon, 518 U.S. at 96 (noting that a district court should consider a downward departure based on a discouraged factor “only if the factor is present to an exceptional degree or in some other way makes the case different from the ordinary case where the factor is present”), quoted in Reed, 264 F.3d at 653-54; U.S.S.G. § 5K2.0(a)(4) (“An offender characteristic or other circumstance identified in . . . the guidelines as not ordinarily relevant in determining whether a departure is warranted may be relevant to this determination only if such offender characteristic or other circumstance is present to an exceptional degree.”). This court has not yet articulated a set of factors to consider in determining what constitutes “exceptional” or “extraordinary” family circumstances. It has instead resorted to a less structured comparative approach that takes the facts of a given case and compares them to the facts and holdings of other cases also involving departures for family circumstances. See, e.g., Holz, 118 F. App’x 928; Reed, 264 F.3d 640. Fortunately, the recent commentary added to § 5H1.6 offers substantial guidance by requiring the presence of the following four “circumstances” before a determination of extraordinariness may be made: (i) The defendant’s service of a sentence within the applicable guideline range will cause a substantial, direct, and specific loss of essential caretaking, or essential financial support, to the defendant’s family. (ii) The loss of caretaking or financial support substantially exceeds the harm ordinarily incident to incarceration for a similarly situated defendant. For example, the fact that the defendant’s family might incur some degree of financial hardship or suffer to some extent from the absence of a parent through incarceration is not in itself sufficient as a basis for departure because such hardship or suffering is of a sort ordinarily incident to incarceration. (iii) The loss of caretaking or financial support is one for which no effective remedial or ameliorative programs reasonably are available, making the defendant’s caretaking or financial support irreplaceable to the defendant’s family. (iv) The departure effectively will address the loss of caretaking or financial support. U.S.S.G. § 5H1.6, cmt. 1(B) (emphasis added). The only factor that the government challenged in the district court was the third factor: Husein’s irreplaceability. Because this challenge also forms the core of the government’s argument on appeal, our analysis omits discussion of any of the other factors listed above. The government argues that because “there were untapped resources available to the family,” Husein was not irreplaceable. Specifically, the government refers to Husein’s oldest sister Shadya, Husein’s mother Fizan, Husein’s oldest brother Fady, and unnamed “friends, other extended family members, or neighbors [who] might have been able to render assistance in Mr. Husein’s care.” (Emphasis added.) But the mere existence of potential alternative sources of assistance or care is not sufficient to undermine a claim of irreplaceability. Instead, as the wording of the Guidelines No. 05-2548 United States v. Husein Page 7 makes clear, the alternatives must also be “reasonably available,” which has been understood to mean “feasible” and “relatively comparable” to the defendant. See Menyweather, 431 F.3d at 699 (emphasis omitted); United States v. Roselli, 366 F.3d 58, 68-69 (1st Cir. 2004). None of the alternatives suggested by the government meets this standard. Although the government is correct in noting that Shadya Husein “was only three months shy of her eighteenth birthday at the time of sentencing,” she was also a full-time high-school student at the time. Fizan Husein was an even less feasible option. She alternated shifts with Fadya at the factory in Sterling Heights in order to ensure that one adult would be home at all times to attend to Husein’s father. If the district court had sent Fadya to jail, her mother Fizan would have been forced to quit her job and stay home. But Fizan was the family’s only source of income aside from Fadya, because Fadya’s father was not receiving any Social Security benefits. Jailing Fadya, in other words, not only would have forced her mother to remain at home, but would have put the entire family on welfare. This fact alone strongly suggests infeasibility. See United States v. Norton, 218 F. Supp. 2d 1014, 1019 (E.D. Wis. 2002) (noting that one of the principal considerations to “have emerged from the cases reviewing § 5H1.6 departures” is “whether the defendant’s absence would force the family onto public assistance”); United States v. Owens, 145 F.3d 923, 926 (7th Cir. 1998) (affirming a downward departure where the defendant supported his family financially and the family would therefore be forced into public housing and/or welfare if he were incarcerated). Finally, Fady Husein lived in Florida, did not have a job, and was unwilling to “step up to the plate” to help his family in Michigan. Fizan herself said that her son “does not help the family in any way. He visits us on occasion, but he doesn’t have a job. He will not come back to live here no matter what happens to Fadya.” (Emphasis added.) In any event, the district court’s conclusion that Fady was not a feasible alternative “financially or otherwise” was based not only on the evidence offered by Husein, but also on the court’s own investigation. The one obvious nonfamilial alternative that neither party mentions—and that the district court failed to consider at sentencing—was for Husein’s father to have gone to a hospital for professional care. This omission is especially glaring because Husein’s father had already received treatment for the same symptoms on several occasions at a nearby hospital. A return to that hospital, accordingly, would seem to have presented precisely the type of alternative that the district court should have considered in determining whether Husein was truly “irreplaceable.” Husein’s case, however, survives this omission in the district court’s analysis for the same reason that Husein’s mother did not present a feasible alternative. Simply stated, the Huseins would not have been able to afford the hospital bills. We recognize that the options of Medicaid and/or hospice treatment might have been available, but the government never suggested them as alternatives. Nor has the government raised the possibility on appeal. As defense counsel noted at oral argument, moreover, Fizan Husein possessed limited “life skills” and likely would not have thought of or even known how to pursue such options in Fadya’s absence. Furthermore, the case on which the government most heavily relies, United States v. Pereira, 272 F.3d 76 (1st Cir. 2001), is easily distinguishable from the present case. The government’s own summary of Pereira reveals that the court specifically noted that “[n]othing in the record supports the district court’s conclusion that the family could not afford such external care” for Pereira’s parents. Id. at 82. Here, in contrast, the record is replete with references to the fact that the Huseins were hovering barely above the poverty line. The district court also spent considerable time discussing the evidence that Husein had presented regarding the essential nature of her financial responsibilities to the family. Although the government insisted at oral argument that Husein had “defrauded” the court by inconsistently representing the extent of her financial contributions and that nothing in the record “excludes [the existence of] other income,” these arguments are unpersuasive. Not only were these arguments never raised before the district court, but the government’s attorney No. 05-2548 United States v. Husein Page 8 in fact conceded at the sentencing hearing that “in this instance I would personally agree that the situation comes somewhat close to what might be considered extraordinary circumstances.” If the stricter de novo standard of review were still applicable, we might be more inclined to conclude that Husein had failed to prove her irreplaceability. But under the again-prevailing abuse-of-discretion standard, we hesitate to “second guess” the determination of the district court. See Menyweather, 431 F.3d at 700. We instead defer to the district court, which possesses a “special competence” because of its “vantage point and day-to-day experience in criminal sentencing” to determine whether the facts are sufficiently extraordinary to warrant a departure. See Koon, 518 U.S. at 98, 99. Deference is especially appropriate where, as here, the court “clearly explains the basis for its finding of an extraordinary family circumstance.” Owens, 145 F.3d at 929. We acknowledge that United States v. Reed, 264 F.3d 640 (6th Cir. 2001), which has been declared the “leading case in the Sixth Circuit on the propriety of a downward departure for family responsibilities,” Marine, 94 F. App’x at 310, was also decided under the abuse-of-discretion standard, albeit in its pre-PROTECT Act incarnation. The Reed court held that the district court had in fact abused its discretion in departing downward 13 levels to account in part for the moneylaundering defendant’s role in helping to care for her sister’s five children. Reed, 264 F.3d at 655. A psychiatrist-prepared assessment had deemed Reed “the glue that holds this family together” for her role in supervising her “dysfunctional” sister and raising her sister’s children. Id. at 653. But Reed, too, is distinguishable from the present case because Reed, unlike Husein, was not living with or financially supporting the nieces and nephews there in question, and in fact took extended, sometimes several-months-long vacations to Jamaica every year. Id. at 655 (finding the district court’s failure to address these facts “troubling”). Two cases from this circuit that have upheld significant, family-circumstances-based downward departures have distinguished Reed on similar grounds. See Holz, 118 F. App’x at 934 (approving a fully noncustodial sentence despite a Guidelines range of 12 to 18 months in prison by concluding that “[t]he district court’s factual conclusions [regarding Holz’s irreplaceability vis-à-vis his wife] in this case, on the contrary [to Reed], find meaningful support in the record”); Marine, 94 F. App’x at 311 (distinguishing Reed in approving a 10-level downward departure due to Marine’s irreplaceability vis-à-vis her three minor children, resulting in a Guidelines range of 30 to 37 months in prison despite an initial range of 87 to 108 months). We therefore conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion by departing downward under § 5H1.6. As noted, however, we must still review the resulting one-day prison sentence for reasonableness within the meaning of Booker and 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). Cf. Menyweather, 431 F.3d at 700-01 (holding that even if the district court abused its discretion in departing downward under § 5H1.6, that error was harmless because family responsibilities can also form part of the “broader appraisal” under § 3553(a) that is mandated by Booker). 2. Husein’s sentence was both procedurally and substantively reasonable In the sentencing memorandum that she submitted to the district court, Husein argued that she was entitled to the noncustodial sentence that she ultimately received with or “even without a downward departure from the guidelines” under § 5H1.6. Post-Booker caselaw confirms Husein’s understanding that family circumstances can form the basis of either a Guidelines-authorized departure or a non-Guidelines, § 3553(a)-based departure, also known as a variance. Cf. United States v. Cousins, 469 F.3d 572, 577 (6th Cir. 2006) (differentiating between a departure “based on Chapter 5 of the Guidelines” (a “Guidelines departure”) and one “based on section 3553(a) factors” (a “non-Guidelines departure” or “variance”)). This point was well stated by the Ninth Circuit in Menyweather: No. 05-2548 United States v. Husein Page 9 In the broader appraisal[] available to district courts after Booker, courts can justify consideration of family responsibilities, an aspect of the defendant’s history and characteristics, 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(1), for reasons extending beyond the Guidelines. District courts now have the discretion to weigh a multitude of mitigating and aggravating factors that existed at the time of mandatory Guidelines sentencing, but were deemed not ordinarily relevant, such as age, education and vocational skills, mental and emotional conditions, employment record, and family ties and responsibilities. 431 F.3d at 700 (emphasis in original) (ellipses, footnotes, and quotation marks omitted).
We review sentences post-Booker for reasonableness. Webb, 403 F.3d at 383. Under the law of this circuit, reasonableness has both procedural and substantive components. United States v. Caver, 470 F.3d 220, 248 (6th Cir. 2006). A sentence is procedurally unreasonable “if the district judge fails to ‘consider’ the applicable Guidelines range or neglects to ‘consider’ the other factors listed in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), and instead simply selects what the judge deems an appropriate sentence without such required consideration.” Id. In the present case, the district court explicitly mentioned § 3553(a) only once in the course of Husein’s entire sentencing hearing. Even then the reference was only to the statute as a whole, as opposed to one or more of its seven individual subsections. In some sense, the lack of an explicit § 3553(a) analysis is understandable. The bulk of the sentencing hearing revolved around Husein’s motion for a downward departure based on extraordinary family circumstances, which the district court treated almost exclusively as a motion for a Guidelines departure as discussed above. Nevertheless, Booker requires us to determine whether the overall sentence, of which the downward departure is only a part, is reasonable within the parameters set by § 3553(a). Webb, 403 F.3d at 383; see also Selioutsky, 409 F.3d at 119 (treating the question of whether a departure is permissible under the Guidelines as simply one element of the general reasonableness review mandated by Booker). The district court need not discuss each and every § 3553(a) factor, but the reasons that it does provide for the sentence must sufficiently reflect considerations akin to those enumerated in the statute. These points were recently summarized in United States v. Dexta, 470 F.3d 612, 614-15 (6th Cir. 2006), as follows: The court need not explicitly consider each of the § 3553(a) factors; a sentence is procedurally reasonable if the record demonstrates that the sentencing court addressed the relevant factors in reaching its conclusion. Moreover, satisfaction of the procedural reasonableness requirement does not depend on a district court’s engaging in a rote listing or some other ritualistic incantation of the relevant § 3553(a) factors. Id. (citations omitted). That the district court treated Husein’s motion almost exclusively as one for a Guidelines departure, accordingly, does not necessarily render the resulting sentence procedurally unreasonable. The issue is not how the district court considered the relevant factors, but simply whether it considered them at all. A review of the record in the present case compels the conclusion that Husein’s one-day sentence was procedurally reasonable. In arriving at this sentence, the district court considered facts that correspond to five of the seven § 3553(a) factors. And the seventh § 3553(a) factor—“the need to provide restitution to any victims of the offense,” 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(7)—was inapplicable to Husein’s case because, as the PSR makes clear, “there is no identifiable victim.” No. 05-2548 United States v. Husein Page 10 Regarding the first factor, the district court amply considered the “nature and circumstances” of Husein’s offense as well as her “history and characteristics.” 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(1). At various points during the sentencing hearing, the court addressed the degree of Husein’s participation in the ecstasy transactions, the nature of her relationship with the relevant buyers and sellers, and the amount of ecstasy involved. The district court also considered Husein’s background, including her financial and employment record, her lack of a criminal record, and, obviously, her family circumstances. Despite the government’s argument to the contrary, the district court also considered the second § 3553(a) factor, which directs the sentencing court to consider, among other things, “the seriousness of the offense” and the need “to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct,” including “further crimes of the defendant.” 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(2). The court explicitly determined that the sentence of 3 years’ supervised release, which included an initial 270-day term of home confinement, would act as a sufficient deterrent to Husein despite the seriousness of her crime: “[Y]our family is going to benefit more by your presence than society is going to benefit from your incarceration. But the sentence in no way is meant to minimize what you did and your participation in this crime, and we hope that this is an adequate enough deterrent to you so that you don’t engage in criminal activity in the future.” See also Menyweather, 431 F.3d at 701 (emphasizing, in upholding as reasonable a family-circumstances-based downward departure, that “[t]he district court clearly believed that, in this case, the potential harm to the close relationship between this single parent and her child outweighed the benefits of a prolonged period of incarceration to achieve deterrence, protection of the public, and punishment”). Regarding the third, fourth, and fifth factors, the district court considered the availability of both custodial and noncustodial sentencing options, the applicable Guidelines range of 37 to 46 months in prison, and also, as noted above, the Sentencing Commission’s stated policy of discouraging the invocation of family circumstances as a ground for a downward departure. See 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(3),(4) & (5). The only applicable factor that the district court appears not to have considered is the sixth factor, which references “the need to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar conduct.” 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(6). To be sure, as this court recently emphasized in United States v. Davis, 458 F.3d 491, 499 (6th Cir. 2006), drastic departures from the applicable Guidelines range typically “leav[e] no room to make reasoned distinctions” between the fortunate defendant and others who might be more deserving. But, as discussed in the substantive-reasonableness analysis below, affirming Husein’s sentence in the present case would not be contrary to the goal of allowing for “reasoned distinctions” that § 3553(a)(6) codifies. We thus conclude that the sentence imposed by the district court, which considered at least five of the six relevant § 3553(a) factors, was procedurally reasonable. See Dexta, 470 F.3d at 615 (finding a sentence to be procedurally reasonably despite the fact that “[u]ndeniably, the district court did not explicitly consider each and every § 3553(a) factor”).
“[E]ven if a sentence is calculated properly, i.e. the Guidelines were properly applied and the district court clearly considered the § 3553(a) factors and explained its reasoning, a sentence can yet be unreasonable.” United States v. Cage, 451 F.3d 585, 591 (10th Cir. 2006), quoted in Davis, 458 F.3d at 496. A sentence is substantively unreasonable if the district court “selects the sentence arbitrarily, bases the sentence on impermissible factors, fails to consider pertinent § 3553(a) factors or gives an unreasonable amount of weight to any pertinent factor.” Caver, 470 F.3d at 248 (brackets and quotation marks omitted). No. 05-2548 United States v. Husein Page 11 Although within-Guidelines sentences receive a presumption of reasonableness in this circuit, United States v. Williams, 436 F.3d 706, 708 (6th Cir. 2006), “a sentence outside of the Guidelines range—either higher or lower—is [not] presumptively unreasonable. It is not. Rather, our reasonableness review is in light of the § 3553(a) factors which the district court felt justified such a variance.” United States v. Collington, 461 F.3d 805, 808 (6th Cir. 2006) (emphasis in original) (citation and quotation marks omitted). In reviewing outside-the-Guidelines sentences such as the one imposed in the present case, accordingly, “we apply a form of proportionality review: the farther the judge’s sentence departs from the guidelines sentence[,] the more compelling the justification based on factors in section 3553(a) must be.” Davis, 458 F.3d at 496 (quotation marks omitted). To be sure, Davis’s emphasis on the distinction between a § 3553(a), multifactor variance (at issue there) and a Guidelines-authorized departure (at issue here) leaves open the question of whether the proportionality test applies to both. See Davis, 453 F.3d at 497 (noting that the district court granted Davis a variance despite having denied him a downward departure). We will simply assume without deciding that the answer is “yes” because, as set forth below, we believe that the downward departure granted to Husein in the present case passes muster even under Davis. As an initial matter, the offense to which Husein pled guilty, 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(C), does not mandate a minimum sentence. (The statutory range is 0 to 20 years in prison.) Congress thus not only envisioned, but accepted, the possibility that some defendants found guilty of that subsection of the statute would receive no jail time at all. This is especially significant in the area of drug-related crimes, where mandatory-minimum sentences, including those mandated by 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(b)(1)(A) and (b)(1)(B), are most common. Section 841(b)(1)(C)’s lack of a mandatory-minimum sentence, in other words, reflects Congress’s stated intent to reserve such sentences for “significant drug traffickers.” Janet Reno & Barry R. McCaffrey, Letter to President Clinton: Crack and Powder Cocaine Sentencing Policy in the Federal Criminal Justice System, 10 Fed. Sent. R. 192 (1998) (discussing the legislative history of the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986). As both this court and the Supreme Court have recognized, moreover, the existence of a mandatory minimum directly affects the discretion of a sentencing judge. See United States v. Fernandez, No. 99-5886, 2000 WL 875695, at  (6th Cir. June 19, 2000) (“When a statutory minimum sentence is involved, . . . the district court lacks discretion to depart downward on the basis of family circumstances.”); Harris v. United States, 536 U.S. 545, 570 (2002) (Breyer, J.,