Opinion ID: 582662
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The district court's horizontal analogy

Text: 71 The district court sought to justify its criminal history departure by resort to both horizontal and vertical analogies. It appears that the probation officer prepared an extended sentencing table in which the mathematical relationship among the sentencing ranges for the extant offense levels and criminal history categories was extrapolated in a manner akin to that endorsed by the Seventh Circuit in Schmude. At one point, the district judge stated that he planned to make the upward departure by increasing the criminal history category additional levels. S.T. 62. The judge then apparently disaggregated Streit's prior consolidated sentences to derive a new criminal history point total. At sentencing, the court and counsel repeatedly made reference to hypothetical criminal history categories of IX, X, and XII. In determining Streit's sentence, the district judge remarked that he was increasing Streit's criminal history category from category VI to category IX. S.T. 80. 72 The district judge's attempt to link the magnitude of his departure to the structure of the sentencing table was commendable. Such an approach has the virtue of preserving, at least to some degree, the relationship that the Sentencing Commission has determined should prevail between a defendant's criminal history and the severity of his sentence. Cf. United States v. Molina, 952 F.2d 514, 522 (D.C.Cir.1992) (commenting that the percentage approach to post-category VI departures described in Schmude appears to make the most sense). 73 We nevertheless must remand because the district court failed to explain adequately the reasoning process that led it to select the 72-month assault sentence it ultimately imposed. The record does not reveal how the district court calculated the extended criminal history categories upon which it relied, and the court did not provide any explanation why it deemed the intermediate categories between VI and IX to be inappropriate. Moreover, the court did not indicate which prior consolidated sentences it had determined were responsible for the underrepresentation of Streit's past criminal conduct, and it did not indicate how many additional criminal history points it was assigning to Streit. See United States v. Notrangelo, 909 F.2d 363, 366 (9th Cir.1990) (holding that it was error for the district court automatically to have taken all prior convictions into account in departing upward under section 4A1.3). We believe the district judge clearly was on the right track. His failure to give a more complete statement of reasons, however, makes it impossible for us to review the reasonableness of the extent of the departure in a meaningful way. 74