Opinion ID: 582662
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Physical Injury Departure

Text: 38 The district court indicated that it was departing upward by the equivalent of four offense levels--from level 12 to level 16--to take account of the bite wounds and crushed thumbs suffered by Agents Oldham and English. Guideline section 5K2.2 authorizes an upward departure in situations where the applicable offense guideline does not provide for a bodily injury adjustment. Streit does not challenge the factual circumstances on which the district court based its decision to depart. The first two prongs of the Lira-Barraza analysis are thus satisfied. 39 The effect of the district court's physical injury departure was to increase Streit's sentence from a range of 30-37 months to a range of 46-57 months. The court justified the degree of this departure by analogy to U.S.S.G. § 2A2.2 (Aggravated Assault), which provides for a two-level increase when a defendant's aggravated assault results in bodily injury. S.T. 55. In arriving at its effective four-level increase, the district court apparently multiplied the two-level increase it derived by analogy from section 2A2.2 by the number of victims involved. S.T. 54-59. 40 The district court's approach was not consistent with the overall structure of the guidelines. If the Sentencing Commission had provided for a two-level bodily injury adjustment in U.S.S.G. § 2A2.4 (Obstructing or Impeding Officers)--the section under which Streit was sentenced--then the court could have added a two-level increase for each of Streit's assault convictions. These increases, however, still would have resulted in only a two-level net increase in Streit's offense level for sentencing purposes once the district court grouped the two convictions pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 3D1.4. Because section 2A2.4 in fact does not provide for any bodily injury adjustment, the trial court could take account of this circumstance only by way of a departure under section 5K2.2 at the end of the sentencing computation. See U.S.S.G. § 1B1.1 (specifying the order in which the guidelines are to be applied). 41 The fact that a sentencing court takes account of a particular aggravating circumstance at the end of its sentencing calculations, via a departure, rather than at the beginning should not permit it to double the impact of that circumstance on the defendant's ultimate sentence. 4 Here, the district court properly drew an analogy to a provision of the guidelines dealing with assaults that result in physical injury. The court misapplied the analogy, however, because it misunderstood the manner in which the analogous guideline provision would have affected Streit's sentence. The purpose of our requirement that sentencing departures be guided by analogy to other guideline provisions is to ensure that the congressional objectives of uniformity and proportionality in sentencing are not defeated by unguided departures. See United States v. Pearson, 911 F.2d 186, 190-91 (9th Cir.1990) (stating that departure by analogy need not be on a strict proportional basis to the guidelines sentence, but vacating a sentence that was significantly greater than the range for the most nearly analogous offense level). Because the district court justified the degree of its physical injury departure on the basis of a flawed analogy, we find the departure unreasonable under the third prong of Lira-Barraza.