Court Opinion

ID: 9489965
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:29:16.762051+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:49.396930
License: Public Domain

BECKER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I.
The majority concludes that the defendant’s statement to a bank teller — “I have a gun; give me all the money” — constituted an “express threat of death” so as to justify a two leyel increase above the base offense level for robbery under the Sentencing Guidelines. See 1995 U.S.S.G. § 2B3.1(b)(2)(F). In contrast to the majority — which spins out an intricate explanation for this counter-intuitive holding — I think the case is very simple.
The majority rests its holding on the last sentence of the relevant Guideline Commentary, which reads:
*881The court should consider that the intent of the underlying provision is to provide an increased offense level for cases in which the offender(s) engaged in conduct that would instill in a reasonable person, who is a victim of the offense, significantly greater fear than that necessary to constitute an element of the offense of robbery.
Id. § 2B3.1, comment., application note 6. The language in the Commentary appears to allow an increase above the base offense level if there is any threat of death, express or implied. However, that Commentary is not binding on the court if it is inconsistent with the Guideline or if it clearly misinterprets the Guideline. See Stinson v. United States, 508 U.S. 36, 43, 113 S.Ct. 1913, 1918, 123 L.Ed.2d 598 (1993) (“If, for example, commentary and the guideline it interprets are inconsistent in that following one will result in violating the dictates of the other, the Sentencing Reform Act itself commands compliance with the guideline.”). I believe that the Commentary at issue is either inconsistent with or clearly misinterprets the relevant Guideline text, which provides:
if an express threat of death was made [during the commission of the robbery], increase by 2 levels.
1995 U.S.S.G. § 2B3.1(b)(2)(F) (emphasis added).
The Guideline itself, then, allows the increase only if the threat is express. Therefore, as I understand Stinson, only an express threat of death will satisfy § 2B3.1(b)(2)(F), regardless of the language in the Commentary. The adjective “express” is defined as:
directly and distinctly stated or expressed rather than implied or left to inference ... Definite, Clear, Explicit, Unmistakable ...
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 803 (1966). There is no way, I submit, that the defendant’s statement meets that definition. It may be an implied threat, but it is surely not an express threat.
I could elaborate upon these views, but they have recently been articulated quite forcefully by the Sixth Circuit in United States v. Alexander, 88 F.3d 427, 428-31 (6th Cir.1996), and by Judge Easterbrook, dissenting in United States v. Hunn, 24 F.3d 994, 999-1000 (7th Cir.1994) (Easterbrook, J., dissenting).1 Judge Easterbrook put it best:
The Sentencing Commission set out to distinguish degrees of threats. Saying that you have a gun does not invariably induce a fear of death. To separate ordinary references to guns, and the apprehension they produce, from the terror that a threat of death yields, the Sentencing Commission provided that only an “express threat of death” justifies the two-level increase. An implication from words and gestures is not enough. Only what the bandit says or conveys in signs, not what the victim reads into shadings of “I have a gun,” is an “express” threat. Anything else dissolves the difference between posturing and genuine threats of death.
Threats lie along a continuum of seriousness and gravity. Yet the Sentencing Commission did not compose a multifactor approach or ask the courts to balance objectives. It created a dichotomy between “express” and “implied” threats of death.... [F]eigning is ordinary for a bank robbery. It may have placed the teller in fear of harm, but harm is not death, and an inference from the announcement of a weapon is not an “express” threat. The application note shows ... that a conditional threat can be “express”; if, as the majority holds, an implied conditional threat also qualified, then “express” has been read out of the Guideline.
Id. (emphasis in original). I endorse these views; hence I respectfully dissent.
II.
Having been alerted to the Judicial uncertainty over the import of § 2B3.1(b)(2)(F), the Sentencing Commission has recently proposed amendments to that Guideline and the Commentary thereto. See Proposed Amend-*882merits to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 60 Crim. L. Rep. (BNA) 2019, 2034 (Jan. 15, 1997). Significantly, the amendment deletes from the Guideline itself reference to “express” in the clause “an express threat of death.” That clause is the source of the difficulty I identified in Part I. This deletion suggests that, whatever the Commission’s intention may originally have been (the Commission writes that the amendments are crafted “to clarif[y] the Commission’s intent to enhance offense levels for defendants whose intimidation of the victim exceeds that amount necessary to constitute an element of a robbery offense”), its original drafting prevented the courts from uniformly effectuating that intention. That the Commission had to remove “express” from the Guideline itself, in order now to ensure uniform application of the Guideline in the courts, makes clear that the original Commentary was without legal force. The Commission impliedly recognizes that the Commentary was inconsistent with the Guideline text, the very inconsistency Judge Easterbrook described in Hunn.
In sum, while in cases that arise after the effective date of the Amendment (assuming that it passes) the district courts will be authorized to impose an upward adjustment on the basis of any intimidation of the victim that exceeds that amount necessary to constitute an element of a robbery offense, in the present case the Guideline must be construed to require an express threat of death. Because the record contains no evidence of such a threat, 1 would vacate the judgment and remand for resentencing.

. In his dissenting opinion in United States v. Cadotte, 57 F.3d 661 (8th Cir.1995), Judge Morris Arnold also expressed his view that the threat of death need be express to satisfy § 2B3.1(b)(2)(F). See id. at 662 (Arnold, J., dissenting).