Opinion ID: 669646
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Under the Statute

Text: 13 We turn first to whether the district court's referral of Williams' guilty plea allocution to the magistrate judge violated the Magistrates Act. In the 1976 amendments to the Magistrates Act, Pub.L. No. 94-577, 90 Stat. 2729, Congress authorized district court judges to assign additional duties to a magistrate. See 28 U.S.C. Sec. 636(b)(3). As the legislative history of the 1976 amendments demonstrates, Congress was troubled by a series of court decisions that construed the Magistrates Act narrowly, stifling the greater use of these judicial officers by the district courts. See H.R.Rep. No. 1609, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. 5-6 (1976), reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. 6162, 6164-66. The amendments accordingly reorganized the Magistrates Act in an attempt  'to clarify and further define the additional duties which may be assigned to a United States Magistrate.'  Gomez v. United States, 490 U.S. 858, 867, 109 S.Ct. 2237, 2243, 104 L.Ed.2d 923 (1989) (quoting H.R.Rep. No. 1609, at 2). The revised Sec. 636(b)(3) reads as follows: A magistrate may be assigned such additional duties as are not inconsistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States. 14 The scope of Sec. 636(b)(3) has been illuminated by two recent Supreme Court decisions. In Gomez, the Court held that a magistrate's conducting of a jury voir dire without the defendant's consent is not one of the additional duties a district court has authority to assign to a magistrate. 490 U.S. at 875-76, 109 S.Ct. at 2247-48. Later, Peretz v. United States, 501 U.S. 923, 111 S.Ct. 2661, 115 L.Ed.2d 808 (1991), explicitly ruled a district court's delegation to a magistrate of a jury voir dire with the defendant's consent did not violate the Magistrates Act or Article III: The considerations that led to our holding in Gomez do not lead to the conclusion that a magistrate's 'additional duties' may not include supervision of jury selection when the defendant has consented. Id. at ----, 111 S.Ct. at 2667 (emphasis added). The Court further noted that its holding in Gomez was narrow and limited to cases in which the parties had not consented to the additional role the magistrate played. See id. at ----, 111 S.Ct. at 2664. The Supreme Court's analysis in Peretz applies to the case before us; in fact, it controls it. 15 In order for a Rule 11 allocution properly to fall within the sphere of additional duties authorized by Congress in the Magistrates Act, it must bear some relationship to those duties already assigned to magistrates by the Act. See id. at ----, 111 S.Ct. at 2666. An allocution is an ordinary garden variety type of ministerial function that magistrate judges commonly perform on a regular basis. The catechism administered to a defendant is now a standard one, dictated in large measure by the comprehensive provisions of Rule 11 itself, which carefully explain what a court must inquire about, what it should advise a defendant and what it should determine before accepting a plea. See Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(c), (d) and (f). Further, administrating an allocution is less complex than a number of duties the Magistrates Act specifically authorizes magistrates to perform. For example, such judicial officers may hear and determine pretrial matters, other than eight dispositive motions. See 28 U.S.C. Sec. 636(b)(1)(A). In addition, a magistrate may conduct hearings, including evidentiary hearings, and submit to the district court recommended findings of fact for the eight dispositive motions, and do the same with habeas petitions. See id. Sec. 636(b)(1)(B). 16 In construing the additional duties clause as encompassing the referral to a magistrate judge of a Rule 11 allocution, we rely on the same rationale spelled out by Peretz: The generality of the category of 'additional duties' indicates that Congress intended to give federal judges significant leeway to experiment with possible improvements in the efficiency of the judicial process that had not already been tried or even foreseen. 501 U.S. at ----, 111 S.Ct. at 2667. Congress evinced its purpose, the Court continued, by including a broad residuary clause in the Act rather than a bill of particulars. Id. 17 The legislative history of the Magistrates Act and its various amendments supports the notion that it aims to give district courts the helping hands of a magistrate judge so as to free the district court from the burden of dealing with subordinate, but distracting, duties. Id. at ----, 111 S.Ct. at 2668. Use of this judicial officer, as the House Judiciary Committee explained, is encouraged by putting the authority to delegate work to it in a separate subsection, broadening the category of delegable duties beyond pretrial matters. H.R.Rep. No. 1609, at 12, reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. at 6172; see also S.Rep. No. 1065, 92d Cong., 2d Sess. 3 (1972), reprinted in 1972 U.S.C.C.A.N. 3350, 3351 (magistrates render valuable assistance to the judges of the district courts, thereby freeing the time of those judges for the actual trial of cases); H.R.Rep. No. 1629, 90th Cong., 2d Sess. 12 (1968), reprinted in 1968 U.S.C.C.A.N. 4252, 4254-55 (purpose of Magistrates Act is to cull from the ever-growing workload of the U.S. district courts matters that are more desirably performed by a lower tier of judicial officers). 18 Even were a magistrate's taking of a guilty plea to be viewed as an additional duty of greater importance than those duties specifically assigned to magistrates, the consent requirement--fulfilled in this case--saves the delegation. Consent is the key. See Peretz, 501 U.S. at ----, 111 S.Ct. at 2667; H.R.Rep. No. 287, 96th Cong., 1st Sess. 20 (1979) (Because of the consent requirement, magistrates will be used only as the bench, bar, and litigants desire, only in cases where they are felt by all participants to be competent.). With the parties' consent, a district judge may delegate to a magistrate judge the conduct of civil and misdemeanor trials. See 28 U.S.C. Secs. 636(a)(3), (c)(1). We think these duties comparable in responsibility and importance to administering a Rule 11 felony allocution. 19 Moreover, construing the additional duties clause in this fashion resolves the tension between the interests of a criminal defendant and the policies that concerned Congress and brought about its enactment of the Magistrates Act. Obviously, if a defendant objects, a magistrate judge may not conduct the allocution. But when a defendant consents to the use of a magistrate, as here, it aids an already overburdened district court in moving along its caseload of work. See Government of the Virgin Islands v. Williams, 892 F.2d 305, 311 (3d Cir.1989), cert. denied, 495 U.S. 949, 110 S.Ct. 2211, 109 L.Ed.2d 537 (1990). 1 20 Further, we recognize what might appear at first blush to be an institutional conflict in our present holding with our recent decision in In re United States, 10 F.3d 931 (2d Cir.1993). There we held a district court cannot delegate to a magistrate judge the power to review wiretap applications. See id. at 936. That holding explicitly relied on Congress' plan, as expressed in Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Pub.L. No. 90-351, 82 Stat. 212 (codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. Secs. 2510-2521 (1988)), read in conjunction with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Pub.L. No. 99-508, 100 Stat. 1848 (codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. Secs. 3121-3127 (1988)). See In re United States, 10 F.3d at 934-35. We stated in that case that while the 1976 amendments to the Magistrates Act were intended to overcome prior judicial narrowing of the additional duties clause, Congress' aim to protect individuals from an invasion of their right to privacy nonetheless was one entrusted to Article III judges, and that such aim overrode the scheme, expressed in the Magistrates Act, of increasing district court's utilization of magistrates. See id. at 938. 21 In contrast, in the case at bar, we have no contrary overriding congressional purpose that would cause us to confine the taking of guilty pleas in felony cases only to district judges. The scant evidence that Congress ever considered this issue is found in a Senate Judiciary Committee Report, which in 1979 recommended authorizing a magistrate to take such guilty pleas. See S.Rep. No. 74, 96th Cong., 1st Sess. 17, reprinted in 1979 U.S.C.C.A.N. 1469, 1486. But the Joint Conference Committee passed on doing so, pending a review by the Judicial Conference of the United States. See H.R.Conf.Rep. No. 444, 96th Cong., 1st Sess. 10, reprinted in 1979 U.S.C.C.A.N. 1487, 1491. 22 Of course, proposed amendments by congressional committees in 1979 that do not become law are of little value in interpreting prior legislative enactments, in the present case the Magistrates Act, amended by Congress in 1976. See Pierce v. Underwood, 487 U.S. 552, 566, 108 S.Ct. 2541, 2550, 101 L.Ed.2d 490 (1988) ([I]t is the function of the courts and not the Legislature, much less a Committee of one House of the Legislature, to say what an enacted statute means.); Russello v. United States, 464 U.S. 16, 26, 104 S.Ct. 296, 302, 78 L.Ed.2d 17 (1983) ( 'the views of a subsequent Congress form a hazardous basis for inferring the intent of an earlier one' ) (quoting Jefferson County Pharmaceutical Ass'n, Inc. v. Abbott Labs., 460 U.S. 150, 165 n. 27, 103 S.Ct. 1011, 1021 n. 27, 74 L.Ed.2d 882 (1983)); United States v. Price, 361 U.S. 304, 313, 80 S.Ct. 326, 331, 4 L.Ed.2d 334 (1960) (same). 23 We hold therefore that the additional duties clause of the Magistrates Act authorizes a district court judge in a felony prosecution to delegate to a magistrate judge the task of administering a Rule 11 allocution, provided the defendant consents.