Opinion ID: 672848
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Thompson's Demand for Sentencing at Offense Level 34.

Text: 25 As a fallback position, Thompson argues that the district court should have reduced his offense level by one extra point to reflect the possibility that he might have entered an early guilty plea if he had been properly advised. After authorizing a 2-point reduction for the acceptance of responsibility, the guidelines provide that defendants at as high an offense level as Thompson can reduce their offense levels by a third point if they give early notification of their intention to plead guilty, so that the government can avoid preparing for trial and the court can allocate its resources efficiently. See U.S.S.G. Sec. 3E1.1. Noting the possibility that he could have qualified for this 3-point reduction even if the government had refused all possible plea bargains, Thompson claims that the district court should at least have given him the benefit of this provision. 26 The question for the district court was whether there was a reasonable probability that Thompson, if properly advised, would have pleaded guilty at such a time as to qualify for the 3-point reduction. The court ultimately accepted the government's position that there was no such probability. This conclusion, on first inspection, seems to be in tension with the court's essentially uncontested finding of a reasonable probability that Thompson would have pleaded guilty for the sake of a mere 2 -point reduction. To the extent that a contested factual finding conflicts with an uncontested one, we would think it proper to discard the contested finding; this tendency would lead us to remand the case with instructions to award Thompson the extra point. 27 Here, however, the conflict between the two findings may be illusory. As the government points out, for instance, Thompson's case featured a hotly disputed motion to suppress most of the evidence against him. See Brief for Appellee at 26 n. 15. Thompson might well have been unwilling to abandon this motion (which could conceivably have led to total dismissal of the charges against him) merely for the sake of reducing his total offense level from 35 to 34. Yet it is quite possible that Thompson would have had no chance of receiving a 3-point reduction under Sec. 3E1.1 unless he abandoned the motion. A defendant who makes the government devote considerable resources to litigating a motion to suppress certainly has a weaker claim to the extra point than one who pleads guilty without any fight at all; in any event, trial was only two weeks away when the district court finally ruled on the motion. 1 28 Still, the district court did not make any factual findings along these lines, nor did it appear to rely on any such argument in refusing to award the third point. Instead, in making its critical finding about whether a properly advised Thompson would likely have qualified for the third point, the court apparently relied entirely on the grounds that Thompson pursued an alibi defense and continued to assert his innocence even after being found guilty. These grounds have no bearing on how information about his status as a career criminal would have affected the timing of his hypothetical guilty plea. At the most, they suggest that Thompson would not have pleaded guilty at all --a finding that the district court necessarily rejected when it concluded that the ineffective assistance of his counsel had caused Thompson some prejudice. And in any event, the choices that Thompson actually made do not necessarily shed any useful light on the choices that he would have made if he had been properly advised. 29 Ordinarily, we review the district court's factual findings only for clear error. But when it seems plain that the court arrived at those findings on the basis of faulty logic, such deference is inappropriate. Even if the ultimate findings themselves are not clearly erroneous, the appropriate disposition of the case is to vacate the district court's judgment and remand for further factfinding. United States v. Wragge, 893 F.2d 1296, 1299 (11th Cir.1990); see also, e.g., United States v. Harris, 959 F.2d 246, 264-65 (D.C.Cir.1992). Accordingly, we remand for the district court to reassess the probability that Thompson, if properly advised, would have secured the third point. In conducting this reassessment, of course, the court is free to consider all relevant facts and circumstances, including the fact that the third point would have been available to Thompson only if his sentencing had occurred after October 31, 1992. 2