Court Opinion

ID: 9485749
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:28:47.444669+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:19.887765
License: Public Domain

LAY, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I respectfully concur in the judgment of the majority. I write separately concerning the thirty-year sentence the defendant has received.
This is a state domestic abuse case that a federal prosecutor turned into a federal kidnapping charge because a distraught and abusive husband crossed state lines with his wife and mother of his two children. The evidence shows that after the couple crossed the border from Minnesota to Wisconsin, Gayles’s wife persuaded the defendant to voluntarily drive her back to Minnesota.1
Gayles now faces thirty years in prison essentially for physically abusing his wife. His life is ruined, his wife and two children are directly affected by his imprisonment. The total cost to the public to pursue this interminable imprisonment will amount to approximately one million dollars.2
Much of Gayles’s 30-year sentence is attributable to the trial judge’s decision to classify Gayles as a career offender.3 Without the career offender designation, the Guidelines recommend a sentence of between 100 and 125 months — -roughly a 20-year reduction in sentence. The Guidelines define a career offender as a defendant with at least two prior felony convictions involving either a crime of violence or a drug offense.4 U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1. Gayles concedes he had two such offenses: a 1979 burglary and unlawful restraint conviction for a crime committed when Gayles was 21 years old and a more recent state drug conviction for which he served less than one year in jail.
*741As the majority states, the trial court never considered Gayles’s arguments that the career criminal status overrepresents the seriousness of his criminal history.5 I write separately to emphasize our prior opinions that hold that trial judges may depart downward in career criminal cases because the “guidelines clearly allow for the possibility of departure where the defendant’s conduct is exaggerated by the criminal history score.” United States v. Brown, 903 F.2d 540, 545 (8th Cir.1990).
In United States v. Senior, 935 F.2d 149 (8th Cir.1991), we approved a downward departure under section 4A1.3 based on circumstances that are remarkably similar to this case. See also United States v. Smith, 909 F.2d 1164, 1169-70 (8th Cir.1990), cert. denied, 498 U.S. 1032, 111 S.Ct. 691, 112 L.Ed.2d 682 (1991). In Senior, we observed that the then 27-year-old defendant was only 20 years old when he committed his first predicate offenses — a series of robberies. 935 F.2d at 150-51. Here, Gayles was 21 when he committed the burglary that became the first predicate offense in his criminal history designation. Gayles is now 35. In Senior, we also relied on the short sentence the defendant received for his second predicate offense — drug charges for which he served about eighteen months of a six-year sentence before being paroled. Id. We said this sentence revealed “the state’s assessment of the seriousness of Senior’s crimes as reflected by the state courts’ handling of sentencing and by the length of time Senior actually served.” Id. Gayles’s second predicate offense also was a drug offense. He served less than one year in jail on this charge. This too reflects the seriousness with which the State of Minnesota treated this offense. Although Gayles has had many other skirmishes with the law, most were misdemeanor offenses that do not qualify him as a career criminal. U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1; United States v. Hester, 917 F.2d 1083, 1084 (8th Cir.1990).
On the basis of the above discussion, I join in the remand to vacate the sentence for the trial court to reconsider defendant’s sentence under section 4A1.3 of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

. The fundamental issue in a federal kidnapping case is whether the alleged victim consented to being transported across state lines. United States v. Toledo, 985 F.2d 1462, 1465-68 (10th Cir.1993), petition for cert. filed, (U.S. July 7, 1993) (No. 93-5151); United States v. Chancey, 715 F.2d 543, 546 (11th Cir.1983). The Supreme Court made clear in Chatwin v. United States, 326 U.S. 455, 66 S.Ct. 233, 90 L.Ed. 198 (1946), that "the very essence of the crime of kidnapping" is “the involuntariness of seizure and detention.” Id. at 464, 66 S.Ct. at 237. The Court stated:
The statute was drawn in 1932 against a background of organized violence. Kidnaping by that time had become an epidemic in the United States.... “Law enforcement authorities, lacking coordination, with no uniform system of intercommunication and restricted in authority to activities in their own jurisdiction, found themselves laughed at by criminals bound by no such inhibitions or restrictions ... The procedure was simple — a man would be kidnapped in one State and whisked into another, and still another, his captors knowing full well that the police in the jurisdiction where the crime was committed had no authority as far as the State of confinement and concealment was concerned.”
It was to assist the states in stamping out this growing and sinister menace of kidnaping that the Federal Kidnaping Act was designed. Its proponents recognized that where victims were transported across state lines only the federal government had the power to disregard such barriers in pursuing the captors.
Chatwin, 326 U.S. at 462-63, 66 S.Ct. at 236-37 (citations omitted).

. Gayles’s physical abuse of his wife is not to be condoned. According to the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines, if he were convicted of first degree sexual assault, kidnapping with great bodily harm, or first degree assault (his crime does not necessarily fit these offenses) he would have an offense severity level of VIII. His criminal history score would be 6 or more. On the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Grid these numbers would give him a presumptive sentence of between 153 and 163 months. His federal sentence is 360 months.

. Section 4A1.3 is a policy statement relating to the Adequacy of Criminal History Category. It includes the following statement:
There may be cases where the court concludes that a defendant's criminal history category significantly over-represents the seriousness of a defendant's criminal history or the likelihood that the defendant will commit further crimes. An example might include the case of a defendant with two minor misdemeanor convictions close to ten years prior to the instant offense and no other evidence of prior criminal behavior in the intervening period. The court may conclude that the defendant's criminal history was significantly less serious than that of most defendants in the same criminal history category (Category II), and therefore consider a downward departure form the guidelines.

. The Guidelines also state that the defendant must be at least 18 years of age at the time of the current offense; in addition, the current offense must be a felony conviction for a crime of violence or a drug offense. U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1.

. Some of the confusion relating to the defendant’s objections to the overstatement of his criminal offender status arises because of the withdrawal of defendant’s first counsel, James Ostgard, and the appointment of replacement counsel, Peter Erlinder. Before Erlinder entered the case and well before the sentencing hearing, Ostgard objected to the proposed pretrial sentence report submitted by the Probation Office. In that objection counsel specifically addressed the overstatement and use of the career offender status. The probation officer recognized the objection relating to the overstatement of the defendant’s criminal history and responded:
The information contained in this section of the report assists the Court to evaluate the adequacy of the criminal history category in reflecting the seriousness of the offender's past criminal behavior and in determining whether a departure may he warranted.
(Emphasis added). Gayles’s second attorney submitted a position paper 10 minutes before commencement of the sentencing hearing that further addressed the downward departure. The submission argued that the career criminal status “overstates the seriousness of Mr. Gayles’ criminal history” because ”[b]y any standard, Mr. Gayles' convictions over the past 10 years have not been of the nature that should result in Career Criminal status.”
The trial judge, however, treated the arguments on overstatement of criminal history as a challenge to the 30-year sentence under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The two analyses are quite different. The Eighth Amendment analysis cited by the trial judge looks at the sentence in relation to the crime and permits, as the trial judge correctly observed, only a “narrow review to determine whether the sentence is grossly disproportionate to the crime.” Section 4A1.3 of the Guidelines looks only to the defendant's criminal history to determine if the score significantly underrepresents or overrepresents the defendant’s record and likelihood of recidivism; it does not involve a weighing of sentence and crime.