Court Opinion

ID: 9492042
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:30:56.163457+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:04.880070
License: Public Domain

FLETCHER, Circuit Judge,
Dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. Despite this court’s remand for a “limited purpose” only, the majority allows the district court to stray beyond that purpose. Where the scope of the remand has been expressly limited to consideration of a single sentencing issue, the district court is without *1120authority to revisit other issues. United States v. Petty, 80 F.3d 1384, 1388 (9th Cir.1996); see also United States v. Klump, 57 F.3d 801, 803 (9th Cir.1995) (sentencing court may not consider conduct beyond the scope of a limited remand); United States v. Caterino, 29 F.3d 1390, 1394-95 (9th Cir.1994) (district court’s authority on remand abridged by any express or implied limits in the remand order), overruled on other grounds by Witte v. United States, 515 U.S. 389, 115 S.Ct. 2199, 132 L.Ed.2d 351 (1995).
Whether the district court’s authority is limited depends on whether there is “clear evidence” that the court of appeals intended to issue a limited as opposed to a general remand. See Caterino, 29 F.3d at 1395; Petty, 80 F.3d at 1388; United States v. Ponce, 51 F.3d 820, 826 (9th Cir.1995). A limitation may be express or implied. See Caterino, 29 F.3d at 1394; Ponce, 51 F.3d at 826. Not surprisingly, where panels do intend to issue a limited remand, that “clear evidence” usually comes in the form of an explicit statement that the remand order is of limited scope. See, e.g., United States v. Asrar, 116 F.3d 1268, 1270 (9th Cir.1997) (“Accordingly we remand this [habeas] case to the district court for the limited purpose of granting or denying a certificate of appealability within 42 days of this order.”).
In this case, we made precisely such a statement. Our remand order reads, “We therefore vacate Washington’s sentence and remand for the limited purpose of recalculating his base offense level under section 2J1.2, without applying the cross-reference to section 2X3.1, and resentence him accordingly.” United States v. Washington, 66 F.3d 1101, 1105 (9th Cir.1995). One can hardly imagine a more explicit setting forth of the precise limitation on the district court’s authority on remand. See Ponce, 51 F.3d at 826 (“Had the court sought to limit the scope of the district court’s authority on remand, it could easily have done so.”). In evaluating the propriety of the district court’s de novo sentencing on remand, the majority seriously errs when it ignores the language of the remand order.1
The majority apparently is driven by its sense that justice can be done only with an upward departure to compensate for the direction to the lower court to recalculate the base offense level that results in a lower sentence. Be that as it may, the government should have sought rehearing from this court the first time round rather than urging the district court to ignore the mandate. Our court should not now countenance the disregard of the mandate.
The cases cited by the majority in support of its analysis are cases where the remand was general. In United States v. Moreno-Hernandez, 48 F.3d 1112 (9th Cir.1995), this court remanded for resentenc-ing when we discovered that the 125-month sentence imposed by the district court exceeded the lawful statutory maximum of five years. The remand order-“The conviction is affirmed, but the sentence is VACATED and the case is REMANDED for resenteneing”-contained neither implicit nor explicit limitations on the overall sentence the district court could impose. United States v. Moreno-Hernandez, 999 F.2d 545, 1993 WL 280391 at * 2 (9th Cir.1993). Similarly in Ponce, we found no limitation in a remand order that read “Martinez compels us to vacate the sentences, because the district court erred in departing from the guidelines based on the quantity of drugs involved. Defendant’s sentences should be recalculated accordingly. AFFIRMED, except that the SENTENCES are VACATED AND REMANDED.” Ponce, 51 F.3d at 826.
The majority ignores United States v. Pimentel, 34 F.3d 799 (9th Cir.1994). There, on the first appeal the court expressly limited the remand to consider*1121ation of a single sentencing issue: whether and to what extent the district court would exercise its authority to depart from the guidelines because of the defendant’s extraordinary family circumstances. Id. at 800. On remand, the district court declined to consider other issues. On the second appeal, we said:
In Pimentel I ... we expressly limited the scope of our remand to consideration of a single sentencing issue: whether and to what extent, the district court would exercise its authority to depart based upon Pimentel’s extraordinary family circumstances.
In light of this clear evidence that the scope of our remand was limited to the single sentencing issue raised in Pi-mentel’s prior appeal, the district court was without authority to reexamine any other sentencing issues on remand. See Fed. R.Crim. P. 35(a)(2); Caterino, 29 F.3d at 1395 (holding that in absence of clear evidence to the contrary, defendant’s entire sentence was vacated and all sentencing issues were open to reargument following remand). Accordingly, the district court did not err by declining to address on remand the question of whether Pimentel’s counts of conviction were improperly not grouped when calculating her adjusted offense level.
Pimentel, 34 F.3d at 800.
Here, our mandate’s scope was also limited to a single issue: the district court was directed to recalculate Washington’s base offense level under section 2J1.2 of the Guidelines without applying the cross-reference to section 2X3.1. The instruction to the district court “to resentence accordingly” did not permit it to resen-tence anew.2 Rather, that instruction must be read with the analysis offered in the opinion. Moreover, the instruction is redundant, since a district court never has the authority to take actions inconsistent with remand. The phrase does not signal to the district court that the appellate court had broadened the scope of the issues on remand that it had explicitly limited in the preceding clause.
The government contends in essence, and has persuaded the majority, that the remand authorized the district court to compensate for the striking of the cross-reference by departing upward pursuant to Chapter 5 of the Guidelines. The remand, however, gave the court no such authority. The upward departure, no matter how well justified, was beyond the scope of the remand.

. The majority recognizes that "[t]he inquiry in this case is the scope of the mandate,” but then inexplicably states that it ”decline[s] to determine whether the remand is a 'general' or 'limited' remand, because these terms are not helpful to the inquiry."

. In Pimentel I, the court after direction as to resentencing "remand[ed] for further proceedings.” United States v. Pimentel, 8 F.3d 32, 1993 WL 362253 at *2 (9th Cir.1993). 'To resentence accordingly” is possibly even more restrictive than the language in Pimen-tel.