Opinion ID: 197981
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Crime of Violence Ruling

Text: 18 The severity of Sawyer's sentence in this case depends upon whether his prior felony conviction for burglary constituted a crime of violence under § 2K2.1(a)(4)(A) of the United States Sentencing Guidelines. If, as the district court found, the burglary qualifies as such a crime, Sawyer's base offense level for the current firearms conviction jumps from 14 to 20, increasing his range of punishment from 15-21 months to 33-41 months. Sawyer contends that the district court's ruling rested on an incorrect application of our caselaw. Alternatively, if we endorse the court's interpretation, he urges us to reconsider our precedent. As the question raised is one of law, our review is plenary. See United States v. Fiore, 983 F.2d 1, 2 (1st Cir.1992). 19 The Maine statute under which Sawyer was convicted provides that 20 [a] person is guilty of burglary if he enters or surreptitiously remains in a structure, knowing that he is not licensed or privileged to do so, with the intent to commit a crime therein. 21 Burglary is ... [a] Class B crime if ... [t]he violation was against a structure that is a dwelling place.... All other burglary is a Class C crime. 22 Me.Rev.Stat. Ann. tit 17-A, § 401. 23 A crime of violence is defined in the Guidelines as any offense punishable by imprisonment for more than one year that: 24 (1) has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another, or (2) is burglary of a dwelling, arson, or extortion, involves use of explosives, or otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another. 25 U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a). It is undisputed that the Maine burglary statute has no element related to the use of force, and the burglary was charged as a Class C, non-dwelling crime. The only way to classify Sawyer's burglary as a crime of violence, therefore, is to conclude that it involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another. 26 In conducting an inquiry into whether a crime fits that description, we typically use a formal categorical approach, Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575, 600, 110 S.Ct. 2143, 109 L.Ed.2d 607 (1990); Fiore, 983 F.2d at 3, which means that we look only to the statutory definition of the offense, not to the particular facts underlying the conviction. The government maintains that we already have performed such an analysis for the crime at issue here, pointing to our holding in Fiore that a conviction for breaking and entering a commercial structure, like burglary of a dwelling, satisfies the crime of violence rubric. 2 Sawyer offers two retorts: first, that this case is distinguishable from Fiore; and, second, that Fiore should be abandoned as the guidepost for non-dwelling burglaries. 27 Sawyer contends that Fiore does not govern this case because the Rhode Island burglary statute at issue there is significantly different from the Maine statute, particularly with respect to the inherent risk of violence. The statute in Fiore punished the breaking and entering of various types of structures, at night, with the intent to commit murder, rape, robbery or larceny. See 983 F.2d at 4 n. 6. Sawyer emphasizes that the Maine statute does not require a breaking and entering, which on its own implies forceful conduct; an unprivileged entry or surreptitious remaining is enough to constitute unlawful presence. In addition, the burglar's requisite intent in Maine is to commit any crime, not one of the four serious felonies listed in the Rhode Island law. According to Sawyer, these differences obligate a sentencing judge to look beyond the statutory language to the charging documents and other sources to determine whether the particular non-dwelling burglary posed a serious potential risk of physical injury to another. See Taylor, 495 U.S. at 602, 110 S.Ct. 2143 (where a single statutory provision defines several crimes, sentencing court may look to charging instrument and jury instructions to determine if crime committed satisfies crime of violence elements); United States v. Winter, 22 F.3d 15, 18 (1st Cir.1994). 28 Although, in the abstract, reliance on such statutory distinctions might be reasonable, Sawyer's argument is unavailing here because it ignores the scope of the precedent. Our decision in Fiore did not rest on the risk posed by an actual break-in; nor was it linked to the nature of the crime intended to be committed in the burglarized building. Rather, after referring to the Supreme Court's observation in Taylor that commercial burglaries often 'pose a far greater risk of harm' than burglaries of dwelling places, see Fiore, 983 F.2d at 4 (quoting Taylor, 495 U.S. at 594, 110 S.Ct. 2143), we generally concluded that burglary of a commercial building poses a potential for episodic violence so substantial as to bring such burglaries within the violent felony/crime of violence ambit, id. 29 That our conclusion was meant to embrace a non-dwelling burglary even in the absence of the explicit danger factors present in Fiore is revealed by the context of the language we quoted from Taylor. The Supreme Court in that case was called upon to determine the meaning of the word burglary as used in the sentence enhancement provision of the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA), 18 U.S.C. § 924(e), which in similar fashion to the sentencing guideline at issue here, provides harsher penalties for those with certain types of prior convictions, including a violent felony. 3 The term violent felony is defined to include burglary. In the course of its opinion, the Court rejected the view that Congress meant burglary in the ACCA to cover only a special subclass of burglaries, such as those meeting the common law definition, 4 and instead adopted a generic, contemporary meaning, 495 U.S. at 598, 110 S.Ct. 2143. That definition covers any unlawful or unprivileged entry into, or remaining in, a building or structure, with intent to commit a crime. Id. at 599, 110 S.Ct. 2143. 30 With that understanding of the word burglary as backdrop, and no limiting language, we believe Fiore must be read to extend the otherwise clause of § 4B1.2(a)(2) to any conviction for a non-dwelling burglary where the statute violated includes the elements of a generic burglary as defined by the Supreme Court in Taylor. See United States v. Hascall, 76 F.3d 902, 904-906 (8th Cir.1996) (relying on Fiore in holding that two commercial burglaries were crimes of violence under the Guidelines). In essence, Fiore states that when a generic burglary takes place it is irrelevant that the structure invaded is not a dwelling; indeed, the Supreme Court's definition of generic burglary explicitly includes any building or structure. All of the elements of generic burglary are included in the statute under which Sawyer was convicted, see supra at 194, and Fiore is thus applicable. 31 Anticipating a determination that Fiore governs and is fatal to his claim, Sawyer alternatively urges that we abandon Fiore and adopt instead the approach taken by the Tenth Circuit in United States v. Smith, 10 F.3d 724 (1993) (per curiam). The court there held that the conspicuous omission of burglary from the list of specific crimes of violence in § 4B1.2(a), with the single exception of burglary of a dwelling, reflected a policy judgment by the Sentencing Commission that  'mere' unlawful entry of a non-dwelling for the purpose of stealing property does not present a serious potential risk of physical harm to others. Id. at 732-33; see also United States v. Spell, 44 F.3d 936, 938 (11th Cir.1995) (per curiam); United States v. Harrison, 58 F.3d 115, 119 (4th Cir.1995); United States v. Jackson, 22 F.3d 583, 585 (5th Cir.1994). The panel in Smith advocated a narrow interpretation of the Guidelines' otherwise clause in part because of the inherent tendency of the career offender provisions to impose severe punishments at sudden and arbitrary junctures, in contrast to the carefully constructed, graduated scheme of sentencing reflected in the Guidelines. 10 F.3d at 732. 32 Whatever the merits of this approach, it is not the one this court has followed, and we are not at liberty to revisit the question without more reason than Sawyer has provided. See United States v. Clase-Espinal, 115 F.3d 1054, 1056 (1st Cir.1997) (citing Williams v. Ashland Eng'g Co., 45 F.3d 588, 592 (1st Cir.1995), for the proposition that First Circuit panels generally are bound by a prior panel decision directly on point). 33 We therefore hold that the district court properly classified the burglary for which Sawyer was convicted as a crime of violence. 34 The judgment of the district court is affirmed.