Court Opinion

ID: 9489674
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:21:18.840951+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:39.452505
License: Public Domain

TERENCE T. EVANS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
It’s hard to imagine that when the federal sentencing guidelines became law, anyone thought appellate courts would tinker with sentences to the degree that they do today. After all, during our nation’s entire history, trial judges imposed sentences (cabined only by maximum terms prescribed by law) with, for all practical purposes, unlimited discretion. Appellate courts, during all those years, were rarely involved in sentencing, which was viewed as a unique, intensely personal, and often fact-specific process that did not lend itself to micromanagement from afar. But today, almost nine years after the federal sentencing guidelines became effective, appellate courts routinely fine-tune sentences. The willingness, and in some cases eagerness, to tread in this area encourages more appeals (rarely today is a criminal case appealed without a few sentencing issues), leads to more uncertainty in the district courts, and unduly complicates and elongates sentencing proceedings. This case is a good example of one where we should not be tinkering with the work of the district court.
This case is a bit unusual because both the government and Maurice Horton agree that an upward departure under § 5K2.7 is justified. In the plea agreement the government agreed to suggest a 3-level upward move. Judge Mills thought 8 levels, under the unique facts of the case, was called for. With a base offense level of 12, an unehal-*321lenged 2-level deduction for acceptance of responsibility, and an admitted criminal history category of III, the range selected by the judge’s computations was 33 to 41 months.1 The range with a 3-level bump would have been 18 to 24 months. The judge imposed a term of 40 months, 16 months more than the top of the rejected range.
The guideline for making a bomb threat (U.S.S.G. § 2A6.1 — “Threatening Communications”) is purposefully vague. The Application Note says:
The Commission recognizes that this offense ineludes a particularly wide range of conduct and that it is not possible to include all of the potentially relevant circumstances in the offense level. Factors not incorporated in the guideline may be considered by the court in determining whether a departure from the guidelines is warranted.
Here, the district court, in a thorough decision — see United States v. Horton, 907 F.Supp. 295 — selected a range that allowed for an enhanced sentence based primarily on the timing of Horton’s threat that a bomb was going to blow the Findley Federal Building to smithereens. Judge Mills reasoned that Horton’s threat, coming just one day after the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was blown away, justified a longer sentence than the one contemplated in the plea agreement or the guidelines without a major upward departure. The majority says Judge Mills engaged in a “type of global justification” that did not “address the separate issue of the reasonableness of the extent of the upward departure the court actually imposed.” I can’t agree. As I read the judge’s decision, he fully explained why he selected the sentence imposed and adequately justified — globally or otherwise — his choice.
Finally, I find the majority’s treatment of this issue to be inconsistent with the recent reasoning of the Supreme Court which, viewing the problem globally, thought appellate courts should give more deference to trial judges who depart under the guidelines. Koon v. United States, — U.S. —, 116 S.Ct. 2035, 135 L.Ed.2d 392 (1996), in my view greatly alters the landscape of appellate review of departures under the guidelines. Koon tells appellate courts to dump their de novo review of departures and adopt, instead, a deferential “abuse of discretion” standard. In my view, this monumental change alone casts a pall over all of our earlier departure jurisprudence. Because Horton timed his threat to be particularly effective in the wake of Oklahoma City (you can bet those who bailed out of the federal building in Springfield were very fearful), his act was outside the “heartland” of typical bomb scare eases. Because the reason for the departure — a significant disruption of a governmental function — is not a forbidden or discouraged reason for departure but instead is an encouraged factor, and because the district judge gave a reasoned explanation for his decision that we should honor because it’s not totally wacky, the decision should be affirmed. And from now on, all departures by district courts under the guidelines— whether up or down — should in my view be treated with more respect by federal courts of appeals.

. To avoid complicating the arithmetic of the matter, I’ll not mention the rejected deduction under U.S.S.G. § 2A6.1(b)(2) which the majority leaves open for consideration on remand by a new judge. Suffice to say, however, that I disagree with that result.