Opinion ID: 55822
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Majority Mischaracterizes Ford's conviction

Text: The majority reaches its conclusion relying on three flawed justifications. The majority unsuccessfully attempts to justify its inference of an intent to distribute from Ford's guilty plea conviction in three different ways: (1) by mis-characterizing Ford's conviction; (2) by inferring an intent to distribute from simple possession; and (3) by comparing Ford's conviction with United States v. Palacios-Quinonez, 431 F.3d 471 (5th Cir.2005). Each proffered justification is fundamentally flawed. First, the majority attempts to (mis)characterize Ford's intent to deliver as an intent to distribute. The majority concludes quite summarily that Ford possessed drugs with intent to deliver or pass them on to another.  (emphasis added). The majority obviously believes and desires to characterize Ford as intending to pass drugs onto another, which is distribution for federal sentencing purposes. However, no document informs this panel that Ford was convicted for intending to pass controlled substances. He was only convicted for an intent to deliver controlled substances, which includes an intent to offer to sell controlled substances. Gonzales clearly forbids us today to characterize the term delivery in this Texas statute as necessarily including the passing of controlled substances to another, i.e., actually or constructively transferring controlled substances to another. 484 F.3d at 715 (That is, even though the indictment charged [the defendant] with actually transferring, constructively transferring, and offering to sell a controlled substance, the jury could have convicted him based on an offer to sell alone.). Gonzales logically requires us today to consider Ford's conviction as possession with intent to offer to sell and not, as the majority desires, a conviction that implicates an intent to actually or constructively transfer controlled substances. In essence, the majority opinion is asking us to disregard precedent concluding that a disjunctive statute may be pleaded conjunctively and proven disjunctively. Gonzales, 484 F.3d at 715 (quoting United States v. Still, 102 F.3d 118, 124 (5th Cir. 1996)). The majority now re-characterizes Ford's guilty plea as necessarily convicting him of possession with intent to transfer, rather than with intent to offer to sell, although the latter is the only intent or offense imputable to him under the Taylor categorical approach. Thus, the majority disregards Gonzales and an established line of precedent under which we are required to assume that the conviction was necessarily established under only the least culpable of the disjunctive possibilities, i.e., possession with intent to offer to sell.