Opinion ID: 1202601
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: Repercussions of the Majority's Decision on Civil Rights

Text: The majority, with its decision today, has joined in the national trend of arming prosecutors with tools that will obtain more convictions, but the increase in convictions will come with total disregard for whether the accused actually committed the crime. Although the war on drugs has become fashionable, the war has done little to stop drugs and the violence associated with them! Indeed, the main casualties of this war have been justice and civil liberties. In this Court, it seems to me that when a defendant is accused of the current crime of fashion (any crime with the word sexual in it), his constitutional rights cease to exist. This trend toward the erosion of civil rights has been set by the federal courts, but recently state supreme courts have been issuing decisions that are eroding basic constitutional protections as well. I hope today's decision is an aberration; however, I fear that the majority's opinion is indicative of a trend towards the erosion of civil liberties in West Virginia. Some of these assaults on civil liberties have been well-documented. As part of the war on drugs Congress has armed federal prosecutors with the ability to confiscate any property that could be tangentially related to a drug crime, thus depriving property owners who may know nothing about the crime of their property without due process. [13] Similarly, despite the apparent violation of the Sixth Amendment, the federal prosecutors have prevented accused people from hiring counsel by seizing all assets of an accused, including fees already paid to the accused's lawyer. [14] As John Henry Hingson III, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, noted: The federal criminal defense bar had the wind knocked out of it when the United States Supreme Court declared that preconviction attorney fee forfeiture did not deny the federal rights to counsel and due process of law. States were quick to follow suit, enacting forfeiture legislation that mirrored the federal model. Prosecutors would have it much easier now, in both the state and federal courts. Depriving citizens accused of their chosen champions makes obtaining the one word verdict so much easier. Public defenders already toiling under backbreaking conditions will be awash in a sea of complicated criminal cases. John Henry Hingson III, Fee at Last! State Constitutions and Attorney Fee Forfeiture, The Champion, April 1993, 31. Although seizures of assets and preventing the retention of counsel are the more obvious methods being used by prosecutors to raise their conviction rates without regard to the innocence of the accused, the more subtle methods are perhaps the most insidious. The most damaging of these subtle methods is the implementation of the federal sentencing guidelines, a process somewhat akin to what the majority has done today in the case before us. Congress enacted the system that created the federal sentencing guidelines with an eye towards replacing the allegedly haphazard approach to sentencing in federal courts with a new system that scientifically assigned prison terms based on the charges and other conduct. The measure was enacted with strong bipartisan support (Sen. Strom Thurmond and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy were co-sponsors). The goal was to make criminals who commit similar crimes serve similar sentences. However: The sentencing reforms of the last fifteen years have pointed in some useful directions, but in their current form they are bankrupt. These reforms have had consequences that few of their proponents anticipated. Some things are worse than sentencing disparity, and we have found them. [Emphasis added.] Albert Alschuler, The Failure of Sentencing Guidelines: A Plea for Less Aggregation, 58 U.Chi.L.Rev. 901, 902 (1991). This result is just one more example of the natural law that you cannot bureaucratize excellence, you can only bureaucratize mediocrity. We have seen it in our public school system and in the way the Department of Motor Vehicles clerks provide service; now we have injected it into the federal courts. Judge José A. Cabranes of the U.S. District Court of Connecticut [15] observed that despite the lofty goals set for the federal sentencing guidelines, the guidelines do not: even come close to achieving the asserted objectives of confining discretion and eliminating the bogeyman of disparity. Indeed, disparity is not only alive and well, it is now probably more common than before and certainly more hidden than before. This is true in part because the Guidelines have sub silentio moved the locus of discretion from the judge to the prosecutor. It is largely the prosecutor, for example, who determines the quantity of drugs that will be charged or urged as the appropriate measure in calculating the Guidelines score; it is the prosecutor who will press or ignore the Probation Officer's calculation of the defendant's criminal history score; it is the prosecutor who will choose whether to stipulate facts dramatically increasing or decreasing the defendant's Guidelines range. [Emphasis added.] Cabranes, speech to University of Chicago Law School, 15 January 1992. Moreover, federal judges note that even the theoretically objective probation officers, who compile the factual reports upon which the judges are supposed to base their sentencing calculations, are, after all, usually Pinocchios in the hands of Prosecutorial Gepettos. Jack Weinstein, A Trial Judge's Second Impression of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 66 Southern Cal. L.Rev. 357, 360 (1992). Just as the federal sentencing guidelines were implemented with bi-partisan support, the call for elimination of the guidelines is now strident among people who actually must work under the system. Judge Richard Posner described the effects of the guidelines as crazy and loony; so much so that the use of the guidelines in the case that employed those words deprived the defendants of their equal protection rights. United States v. Marshall, 908 F.2d 1312, 1332 (7th Cir.1990) (Posner, J., dissenting), aff'd sub nom. Chapman v. United States, ___ U.S. ____, 111 S.Ct. 1919, 114 L.Ed.2d 524 (1991). Judge Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York cites one of his colleagues as saying [T]he Guidelines ... have made charlatans and dissemblers of us all. We spend our time plotting and scheming, bending and twisting, distorting and ignoring the law in an effort to achieve a just result. All under the banner of `truth in sentencing'! Weinstein, supra, at 365. Judge Weinstein goes on to note: [U]se of the guidelines does tend to deaden the sense that a judge must treat each defendant as a unique human being. The present system contributes to the bureaucratic mentality described by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of the banality of evil. [Footnote omitted.] While it is not conceivable that federal judges will slide down the slippery slope to the utter inhumanity of their judicial counterparts in Nazi, fascist, and communist regimes, it is quite possible that we judges will cease to aspire to the highest traditions of humanity and personal responsibility that ought to characterize our office. Hysteria over crime has poisoned much of our society, including the justice system. [Emphasis added.] Id. at 366. Our own majority's hysteria over crimes with the word sexual in them have poisoned their view of the civil rights of accused persons in exactly the same way that the federal courts have been poisoned by drug prosecutions. They are setting a very bad precedent with their decision today. Another horrible effect of the federal sentencing guidelines on the federal judicial system is the way in which noncharged conduct (or indeed conduct of which the defendant has been actually acquitted ) is still held against the defendant under the sentencing guidelines, thus requiring judges to sentence defendants for crimes of which they were either acquitted or never tried. As Judge Jon O. Newman of the Second Circuit stated in his 25 March 1993 dissent to the denial of en banc review of the decision in United States v. Concepcion, 983 F.2d 369, 395-396 (2d Cir. 1992) reh'g denied sub nom. United States v. Frias (Newman, J. dissenting): One of the bizarre aspects of the current Sentencing Guidelines regime is that a defendant can receive the same sentence whether he is convicted or acquitted. That phenomenon occurs when a defendant is charged with multiple counts. The pending case of Nelson Frias illustrates the problem. Frias was convicted of two counts of firearms violations and acquitted of a drug conspiracy violation. His applicable guideline range based solely on the convicted conduct would have been 12 to 18 months. His actual guideline range, based in part on the drug conspiracy of which he was acquitted, was 210 to 262 months. This is the same range that would have been applicable had he been convicted of the drug conspiracy. [Emphasis added.] The net effect of the guidelines works to remove discretion from judges and to put it in the hands of prosecutors. This leads me to the inescapable conclusion that our federal judges have lost what José Cabranes might call their cajones. Indeed, the commission that created the Guidelines expressed concern that one of the major drawbacks of the guidelines is the potential to turn over to the prosecutor the power to determine the sentence by increasing or decreasing the number (or content) of the counts in an indictment. Federal Sentencing Guideline Manual, October 1987, Chapter 1, Part A, Policy Statement 4The Guidelines Resolution of Major Issues. As Albert Alschuler describes it: [A] system of sentencing guidelines that on its face prescribes severe sentences but leaves plea bargaining unconstrained is a prosecutor's paradise. Sentencing guidelines masquerade as the sentencing commission's determination of appropriate penalties. In reality, the guidelines are bargaining weaponsarmaments that enable prosecutors, not the sentencing commission, to determine sentences in most cases. In operation, the guidelines do not set sentences; they simply augment the power of prosecutors to do so. Alschuler, supra, at 926. I believe that today's majority opinion, by condoning over-charging on the indictment side, has exactly the same effect in state court that some of the more obscene abuses of guideline sentencing have in federal court. Today, prosecutors have more power and less judicial supervision than ever before. Today's prosecutors are like the sheriffs of the old wild west: they are the law. They participate in (and often lead) the investigations, they prepare the case, and now, increasingly, they set the sentences. [16] The main reason for the shift has been the creation of the war on crime and drugs. Our criminal justice system has shifted from a due process-oriented criminal justice model to a model that has placed increasing emphasis on crime control and crime prevention. Bennett Gershman, The New Prosecutors, 53 U.Pitt.L.Rev. 393 (1992). Prosecutors have become the generals in the war, armed with statutes like RICO, Drug Enterprise, Forfeiture, and the Sentencing Guidelines. Prosecutors have become crime fighters, not just advocates for the state. But because prosecutors are so closely tied to the detection and capture of the suspects, they cannot review the case objectively: In the prosecutor's view, there is no such thing as an innocent suspect or defendant. As a result, today's prosecutors (especially federal prosecutors) do not act fairly towards defendants. In Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963), the U.S. Supreme Court held that Society wins not only when the guilty are convicted but when criminal trials are fair; our system of the administration of justice suffers when any accused is treated unfairly.... `The United States wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in the courts.' However, today's Justice Department does not share that view: Today's goal is simply to maximize convictions. This need to convict has driven prosecutors to rely on the plea bargain as a quick and easy way to maximize the number of convictions. A prosecutor can dispose of several plea bargains in an afternoon, but preparing for and holding a trial might take weeks or even months. [17] Even then, after all that time and effort the prosecutor might not get the precious conviction: the jury might acquit! What's a prosecutor to do? [18] The Justice Department, in its Prosecutor's Handbook on Sentencing Guidelines (1 November 1987), endorsed the position that federal prosecutors must take maximum advantage of the opportunities to use the guidelines to maximize convictions: The Handbook instructs federal prosecutors that it is `imperative' for them to consult the Guidelines before choosing what offenses or counts to charge, particularly in multi-count cases, in order to obtain the `best' (i.e., most substantial sentence) down the road.... [Especially] problematic ... is the Handbook 's express endorsement of sentence enhancement by `splitting counts' between two indictments or between federal and state prosecutions. [Emphasis added.] Stephen H. Glickman and Steven M. Salky, Criminal Defense in the Era of Sentencing Guidelines, 150 PLI/Crim 807 (1989) (PLI Order No. C4-4185). In the case before us the majority have basically enhanced bargaining power by splitting counts. The main way that federal prosecutors obtain the best results of maximum prosecutions is by encouraging defendants to plead guilty regardless of whether the defendants are guilty. Indeed: [T]he Guidelines may actually penalize the unsuccessful presentation of a defense at trial. Guideline § 3C1.1 provides for a two-level sentence increase if the defendant's [ sic ] `attempts to impede or obstruct the administration of justice during the ... prosecution of the instant offense.' On its face this may look relatively innocuous, but the official commentary says the sentence enhancement applies if, for instance, the defendant testifies untruthfully at trial. [Footnote omitted.] If courts routinely apply § 3C1.1 in sentencing defendants who testify to their innocence at trialand perhaps also to defendants who present any unsuccessful defense on the merits it will be a significant disincentive to going to trial. To make the point another way, there is potentially a four-level sentencing difference between presenting a vigorous but unsuccessful defense at trial and pleading guilty with an appropriate acceptance of personal responsibility. Glickman, and Salky, supra (WL ). The Guidelines have given federal prosecutors the ability to create extremely high potential sentences in order to coerce defendants into pleading guilty instead of going to trial. The majority's decision in the case before us gives West Virginia prosecutors a similar power. When it comes to a sexual abuse case, the majority has given the prosecutor carte blanche to charge as many counts of that abuse as he would like. An innocent defendant facing a potential of consecutive sentences adding up to 50 or 60 years will feel strong pressure to plead guilty to a lesser charge and be sentenced to one to five years with probation. Moreover, if the prosecutor offers the same deal to the actual criminal in exchange for his testimony against an innocent alleged defendant, the true criminal would jump at the chance, while the innocent co-defendant would now face prosecution and a potential 60 year sentence instead of serving probation simply because he is innocent and demands to go to trial. The majority should recall the recent case of Glenn Dale Woodall, and the way that the police and prosecutors manufactured the case against him, to realize that prosecutors do not behave as if they are seeking justice, but try to maximize convictions. See State v. Woodall, 182 W.Va. 15, 385 S.E.2d 253 (1989) (Neely, J., affirming in part, reversing in part the initial conviction due to errors at trial. Subsequent DNA evidence revealed that the prosecution and police manufactured a large part of their case against Mr. Woodall, and the State settled Mr. Woodall's lawsuit for wrongful imprisonment for $1 million). Moreover, the Woodall case stands out not because it is rare, but because the prosecutor and the police got caught manufacturing a case against an innocent defendant. Often we see a situation where the prosecutor offers a group of suspects a deal: Turn in the others, and you'll receive a light sentence. So who accepts the deal? The truly guilty accept the deal, knowing it's the best they can do. However, the innocent in the group will not plead, because they did not commit a crime. At that point, the prosecutor turns full bore against the innocent defendants; then the combination of the other testimony and the prosecutor's quest for conviction are often difficult to overcome. The prosecutor does not need any more leverage to coerce innocents to plead guilty; however, the majority's opinion today gives the prosecutor the ability to bring a virtually unlimited number of counts against a defendant without violating the Double Jeopardy clause. It is true that in this case the circuit court had the good judgment to sentence appellant to concurrent sentences. Although no significant injury befell appellant ex post, that does not cure the problem caused by the violation of appellant's double jeopardy rights. There is no way ex ante that appellant could have known that the circuit court would sentence him that way. If, before the trial, he was presented with a plea offer by the prosecution, the prosecutor surely would have impressed the defendant with the potential for consecutive sentences if he did not plead guilty. With today's opinion, the majority is falling into the same trap that the federal sentencing guidelines have created for the federal judiciary: increased charging discretion for the prosecutor necessarily leads to decreased justice being provided by the courts. Finally, I would add one last observation: Specialization in the law has now relegated criminal law to the ministrations of a small group of lawyers at the top of the profession, and to an incalculably larger group of lawyers at the bottom. There is little in between. Because criminal law involves almost exclusively the processing of impecunious members of the underclass, insufficient money is at stake in any criminal case to attract prominent, well-connected lawyers. Although a few white collar criminals and a few drug dealers have enough money to hire good lawyers, almost all criminal defendants are represented by overworked, underpaid public defenders or court-appointed lawyers. Sometimes public defenders are young, ambitious, intelligent, idealistic advocates; most of the time, however, public defenders are simply hacks. Court-appointed lawyers are often good, but lawyers who find that they can make vastly more money in civil practice seek to avoid court appointments. In West Virginia, not only does court-appointed criminal work pay badly, with adequate funds never being appropriated by the legislature, court-appointed criminal work often does not pay at all. Thus, the legislature, the bar, and now the courts are coming to treat the whole field of criminal law as just another part of the waste management industry. The staffs of prosecuting attorneys are largely composed of bureaucratized government lawyers whose interest in being on the cutting edge of the law is vanishingly small. Assistant prosecutors, in general, are folks who have accepted the regular hours and fair job security of the government coffee suck in lieu of more arduous, stress-laden and challenging work. On the federal side, with the advent of secure, reasonably well paid, lifetime jobs as civil service prosecutors (unlike yesteryear when the U.S. Attorney's office was a training ground for great lawyers), professional federal prosecutors now have little sense of common humanity and see defense counsel not as adversaries but as personal enemies. Although, perhaps, this description is a bit of a caricature, like all caricatures, it is but an exaggeration of the God-given truth. Unlike the days of my youth when most high quality lawyers at least from time to time found themselves in criminal court, today the lawyers with political connections, high-powered intellectual equipment, and good supporting staffs have no knowledge of nor interest in anything that has to do with criminal justice. Furthermore, this tendency to have criminal law practiced by an extraordinarily narrow group of specialists is even more pronounced in the federal courts where, as I indicated earlier, arduous efforts have been made by lifetime, civil service prosecutors to keep high quality, expensive lawyers who might beat them out of the system. Part of our problem, then, is that the great majority of lawyers in this countryparticularly those working in the enormous corporate and defense firmshave absolutely no idea what a joke custom crafted, individualized justice has become in the federal court system and what a joke custom crafted, individualized justice is in danger of becoming in the state court systems. It is time, then, for us to take a stand on this frontal assault on our civil liberties; it is time for the courts to reassert their proper role in the administration of justice. I regret that the majority, in its yielding to hysteria over a crime that has the word sexual attached to it, has failed to see the consequences of it's ruling today.