Court Opinion

ID: 9487473
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:17:16.769623+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:17.162320
License: Public Domain

GOLDBERG, Circuit Judge,
with whom DeMOSS, Circuit Judge, joins, dissenting:
This case calls for us to examine the range of information a sentencing court may consider in upwardly departing from the sentencing guidelines. The majority opinion takes a skyward view of the information a sentencing court may consider; I would prefer to keep the informational vistas of sentencing courts a little closer to the horizon.
Thousands of pages and countless words have been written in connection with the sentencing guidelines. The issues in this case require that we add a few more pages to the existing wisdom of this most dynamic area of law. In this case the sentencing guidelines indicated a nadir sentence of 63 months, and the sentencing court took some astronomical route to attain an apogeic sentence of 180 months. Believing that the course taken by the sentencing court was both uncharted and out of bounds, I would reverse. So, let us put on the habiliments of an astronaut as we journey into the world of the sentencing guidelines.
I
The controversy presented to this en banc court is whether a sentencing court can consider dismissed charges in upwardly departing from the sentencing guidelines, and the degree to which a sentencing court must explain its actions when it decides to depart from the guidelines. The defendant in this case, Philip Scott Ashburn, was charged with four counts of armed bank robbery. Pursuant to a plea bargain, Ashburn pleaded guilty to two counts of armed bank robbery in return for a dismissal of the remaining two counts and a promise not to prosecute other crimes which he was suspected of committing. After the sentencing court accepted the guilty plea, it decided that Ashburn’s Criminal History Category did not adequately reflect the seriousness of his criminal conduct or his likelihood of recidivism. The court noted that if Ashburn had been convicted of the crimes he had been charged with, as well as other crimes he was suspected of committing, he would have a Criminal History Category of VI. The court then sentenced Ashburn as if he had been convicted of those crimes that were either dismissed or never charged in the first place. This resulted in a sentence of 180 months, or 230 percent of the maximum guideline range for the crimes for which Ashburn wás actually convicted.
The sentence imposed by the sentencing court was not permitted by the guidelines, and was lacking in the full and adequate justification required by the guidelines for a departure. Each issue will be addressed in turn.
II
The majority argues that dismissed charges may be taken into account by a sentencing court in augmenting a defendant’s Criminal History Category. To support this conclusion, the majority makes a three-step argument. First, it cites U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3 *811for the proposition that a sentencing court may upwardly depart from the sentencing guidelines if it finds aggravating or mitigating factors the sentencing commission did not consider in formulating the guidelines. The majority points to this as proof of the wide latitude sentencing courts have in evaluating data which their sentencing decisions will be based upon. The majority’s argument also implies that, in developing the guidelines, the sentencing commission did not consider the use of dismissed charges to augment a defendant’s Criminal History Category. Second, the majority cites U.S.S.G. § 1B1.4 to support the proposition that the sentencing court may consider any information concerning the background, character and conduct of the defendant when determining whether a departure is permitted, unless the use of that information is prohibited by law. The thrust of this argument is similar to that of the first argument, i.e., sentencing courts may select from a wide range of information in determining whether to depart from the guidelines. Finally, the majority claims that considering dismissed charges does not affect Ashburn’s settled expectations with regard to his plea bargain agreement. The majority asserts that the plea bargain agreement made no guarantees about the length of the sentence, and as such, the departure did not violate the letter of the agreement. The majority’s argument will now be reviewed more thoroughly with the hope of showing that each strand of this triad is weak and unsupportable.
A. Has The Sentencing Commission Considered Dismissed Charges In Connection With The Criminal History Category?
The majority believes that § 4A1.3 creates an aperture for considering dismissed charges in augmenting the Criminal History Category because that section sanctions consideration of any factor not contemplated by the sentencing commission. The issue then turns on whether the sentencing commission contemplated using dismissed charges in connection with departures in the Criminal History Category. There are indications that the sentencing commission did consider the issue, and did not intend to permit the consideration of dismissed charges in augmenting the Criminal History Category.
Control over the information a sentencing court may consider in applying the guidelines is the sentencing commission’s main tool in imposing order in the criminal sentencing process. In response to, this need for limiting the information sentencing courts may rely upon, some courts have adopted the doctrine of negative implication in determining whether the sentencing commission has considered a matter. In other words,' if the sentencing commission has adequately considered the relevance of a factor to the sentencing process, then that factor, as well as related circumstances, shall not be a proper basis for departure. United States v. Mason, 966 F.2d 1488 (D.C.Cir.1992) (the guidelines’ consideration of related factors precludes defendant’s mode of apprehension from being a suitable basis for departure); see also, Robert H. Smith, Departure Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: Should a Mitigating or Aggravating Circumstance be Deemed “Adequately Considered” Through “Negative Implication?”, 36 Ariz. L.Rev. 265 (1994).
This doctrine is particularly important here because the sentencing commission amended U.S.S.G. § 6B1.2 in 1992 to allow sentencing courts to augment the defendant’s Relevant Conduct Category based on charges dismissed pursuant to a plea bargain.1 It would seem that in passing this amendment, the sentencing commission considered the impact of charges dismissed pursuant to a plea bargain, and did not find it necessary to extend consideration of this information to the Criminal History Category. As such, the majority’s reliance on U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3 is misplaced, as it appears that the sentencing commission must have considered the role of dismissed charges in relation to the Criminal *812History Category and, by omission, has prohibited their combination.
B. Does Consideration Of Dismissed Charges In The Augmentation Of The Criminal History Category Violate Any Law?
The 'majority finds further support for its argument in U.S.S.G. § 1B1.4 and the commentary thereto. This section provides that a court may consider “any information concerning the background, character and conduct of the defendant, unless otherwise prohibited by law.” U.S.S.G. § 1B1.4. Furthermore, the commentary to this section specifically states that, “[f]or example, if [a] defendant commitfs] two robberies, but as part of a plea negotiation entered a guilty plea to only one, the robbery that was not taken into account by the guidelines would provide a reason for sentencing at the top of the guideline range.” The majority believes that this section and its accompanying commentary explicitly permit a sentencing court to consider dismissed charges in augmenting a defendant’s Criminal History Category. In fact, the effect of U.S.S.G. § 1B1.4 and its commentary lead me to a contrary conclusion.
Section 1B1.4 of the U.S.S.G. permits sentencing courts to rely on any information not prohibited by law in departing from the guidelines. The majority stated that it could find “no statute, guidelines section, or decision of this court that would preclude the district court’s consideration of dismissed counts of an indictment in departing upward.” However, U.S.S.G. § 6B1.2(a), comment., which implies that sentencing courts should only accept plea agreements that adequately reflect the seriousness of the actual offense behavior, seems to prohibit the consideration of counts dismissed pursuant to a plea agreement. The language in this section closely tracks that of Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(e), which • requires that, if a sentencing court has accepted a plea bargain, then the sentence promulgated should embody the disposition agreed to in the plea bargain agreement. Then Chief Judge Breyer of the First Circuit relied on both U.S.S.G. § 6B1.2 and Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(e) in querying why a guilty plea should be accepted if the agreement that brought the plea about did not call for an adequate sentence. He stated:
The court seems to have departed from the guidelines so that defendant’s sentence would reflect the conduct charged in the remaining eleven counts of the indictment (counts that were dismissed in exchange for his guilty plea). But if the court believed that defendant’s punishment should reflect that conduct, why did it accept the plea bargain in the first place?
United States v. Plaza-Garcia, 914 F.2d 345, 348 (1st Cir.1990); Cf. United States v. Greener, 979 F.2d 517, 521 (7th Cir.1992) (upholding a district court’s rejection of a plea bargain because it did not adequately reflect the defendant’s. actual offense conduct). The majority, however, is not persuaded by the argument that U.S.S.G. § 6B1.2 and Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(e) prevent the augmentation of the Criminal History Category based on charges dismissed pursuant to a plea bargain. Instead, the majority states that the sentencing court was permitted to accept Ashburn’s guilty plea, and still disavow the sentence agreed to in the plea bargain agreement upon a determination that the suggested sentence did not adequately reflect the seriousness of Ashburn’s criminal conduct or his likelihood of recidivism. The majority’s construction will eviscerate Rule 11(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
The majority opinion’s reliance on the commentary accompanying U.S.S.G. § 1B1.4 also calls for a response. That commentary speaks to how a sentencing court would be justified in sentencing a defendant at the upper limits of the guideline range in reliance on charges dismissed pursuant to a plea bargain. The majority quotes this language in footnote 15 of its opinion, ostensibly to demonstrate that this commentary justifies the result in this ease. In fact, the precise language of this commentary speaks only to a sentence at the upper limits of the guideline range. For instance, if the hypothetical guideline range were 63 to 78 months, then the fact that certain charges were dismissed would justify the sentencing court to choose a sentence closer to the ceiling than the floor of the appropriate guideline range. The *813command of the commentary to U.S.S.G. § 1B1.4 is that sentencing courts have discretion within the guideline range, but cannot substitute one range for another. There is nothing in the commentary to U.S.S.G. § 1B1.4 to justify a departure beyond the guideline range. On the contrary, this commentary’s implication is that departures from the guideline range based on dismissed charges are actually prohibited.
C. Does Considering Dismissed Charges Violate A Defendant’s Reasonable Expectation Of The Plea Bargaining Agreement?
As a final measure in justifying the departure by the sentencing court, the majority argues that the plea bargain did not contain any language that would lead Ashburn to believe that the dismissed counts would not be used against him in sentencing. The reason the majority urges this view is that a defendant’s reasonable expectation from the plea bargaining agreement is constitutionally protected, and that if the prosecution breaches its agreement with the defendant, then the defendant may demand specific performance of the agreement or withdraw his plea altogether. Santobello v. New York, 404 U.S. 257, 263, 92 S.Ct. 495, 499, 30 L.Ed.2d 427 (1971). To avoid this difficulty the majority parses the language of the plea bargain agreement to find that it “contained no language that could have led him to believe that the dismissed counts could not be used as a basis for an upward departure.” In the plea bargain agreement, the prosecution stated that it would not prosecute the charges that were dismissed. Based on this reading, the majority argues that Ashburn’s expectations were met since it was the sentencing court, and not the prosecution, that employed the dismissed charges in making a departure.
Since the government promised in the plea bargain agreement that the robberies that took place on July 17 and 24, 1992 would not be pursued, the prosecution violated the plea bargain agreement by presenting Agent Deborah Lynn Eckert’s testimony concerning those bank robberies. However, the majority’s argument goes further than whether the prosecution crossed a line forbidden by a plea bargain agreement in the testimony of one of its witnesses. More significantly, the majority implies that when a defendant accepts the dismissal of certain charges in return for his guilty plea, he has not bargained for any reduction in prison exposure. Addressing this argument requires a determination of what it means to have a criminal charge “dismissed,” or what constructions of the word “dismissed” are reasonable. To answer these questions one must first consider, in broad strokes, what are the consequences of being charged with a crime.
For most persons, being charged with a crime has many consequences: shame, remorse, a reduction in life-chances, loss of freedom, and other associated difficulties. As such, having a criminal charge dismissed brings several benefits to the one charged, not least of which is the avoidance of prison. However, for a defendant facing a multiple count indictment, each additional charge loses its stigmatic quality and simply amounts to the possibility of a lengthier sentence. Once a defendant is at the point were he is poised to admit his guilt, there is little, if any, moral uplift in knowing that two of the four counts that he has been charged with are being dropped. Clearly, a defendant in these circumstances accepts a plea bargain that dismisses certain charges for only one reason: to spend less time in the penitentiary by not having the dismissed charges counted against him at sentencing.
The majority’s argument concerning a defendant’s expectations of the consequences of dismissing certain charges in a plea bargain is simply not plausible in light of a realistic awareness and understanding of a defendant’s perspective on the effect of dismissing charges. Neither Ashburn, nor any other defendant, would ever agree to a guilty plea if he did not believe, quite reasonably, that the charges being dismissed would not be counted against him at sentencing. The result the majority urges results in the coun-terintuitive effects apparent in the case of Ashburn’s sentencing. For instance, the guideline range for the counts Ashburn actually plead guilty to resulted in an intermediate range of a little under six years. Had he instead been tried and convicted of all four *814counts, the upper limit of the guideline range he would have been exposed to would have been less than nine years. See, U.S.S.G. § 3D1.1 et seq. (relating to the guideline’s treatment of multiple count offenses). However, the sentence actually imposed on Ash-bum, and affirmed by the majority today, is 180 months, or fifteen years. The result, which the majority finds reasonable, is that by entering a plea bargain agreement, Ash-burn was given a sentence that was almost twice as long as if he had gone to trial and been convicted on all four counts.
Furthermore, upwardly departing based on the Criminal History Category and dismissed counts is not necessary to achieve the objectives of the sentencing court in Ash-burn’s sentence. The sentencing court departed from the guidelines because it believed that Ashburn’s Criminal History Category did not accurately reflect the extent of his experience with committing robberies. However, the proper way to address the inadequacy of the sentence was not to factor in the dismissed charges. Instead, the sentencing court should have exercised its powers under Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(e) and rejected the plea bargain if it felt that the agreement was too lenient. If the leniency of the agreement did not become apparent until after the presentence investigation, which very often occurs in the period between the submission of a guilty plea and sentencing, then the sentencing court should have offered Ash-bum the opportunity to withdraw his plea.
By rejecting the plea bargaining agreement, the sentencing court could have forced further negotiation between Ashburn and the prosecution, and the parties could possibly have come to an agreement that more accurately reflected the realistic sentencing possibilities Ashburn faced. If Ashburn was to be exposed to additional prison time based on the “dismissed” charges, he should have been so informed, and without this knowledge he could not have knowingly waived his rights in pleading guilty. Trial courts must ascertain that a defendant’s guilty plea is made in a knowing and informed manner, Boykin v. Alabama, 395 U.S. 238, 89 S.Ct. 1709, 23 L.Ed.2d 274 (1969); North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25, 91 S.Ct. 160, 27 L.Ed.2d 162 (1970), and with the confusion the majority invites in its opinion by allowing dismissed charges to creep back in at the sentencing stage, such a knowing and informed waiver is nearly impossible to achieve.
Apart from the patent unfairness of the majority’s argument, there are several negative consequences that will flow from it. The most significant of these is the impact it will have on the plea bargaining process. The plea bargain is an essential component of our criminal justice system, by which all involved benefit. In exchange for a guilty plea, the government promises the defendant that it will either drop certain charges or downgrade the offense charged. In return, the defendant pays for whatever benefit he receives with his cooperation. By agreeing to a plea bargain, the defendant waives several rights, most prominent of which is the right to trial by jury. Plea bargains also benefit society as a whole, since guilty pleas reduce the number of cases on our overburdened court dockets. Our system of criminal justice has come to depend on defendants foregoing their right to a jury trial; if each criminal defendant, regardless of the merits of his case, were to insist on his right to a jury trial, our courts would not be able to function. Studies have supported the efficacy and centrality of the plea bargaining process to our criminal courts. See, Milton Heu-mann, Plea Bargaining 24-35 (1977) (setting forth empirical evidence that plea bargaining is less a response to case pressure than a rational method for the resolution of criminal innocence or guilt).
It is indisputable that the plea bargain benefits all involved, and is vital to the maintenance of order in our criminal justice system. However, the majority’s reasoning will make plea bargaining a much more unstable and haphazard process. Defendants and their counsel will be unable to properly evaluate the consequences of a plea bargaining agreement, for they will never know if the sentencing court will disregard the parties’ compact by considering charges that both the prosecution and defense agreed would not be a factor at sentencing. Obviously, when faced with such a decision, many defendants who would otherwise admit their guilt and *815accept their sentence will find it more attrac-five to test the prosecution’s case at trial,
Ill
The majority’s conclusion that the departure justifications were adequate is also unsupportable. This court has previously outlined the procedure for making such a determination in United States v. Lambert, 984 F.2d 658 (5th Cir.1993) (en banc). In Lambert, this court held that a departure will be affirmed if the sentencing court offers acceptable reasons for its departure and if said departure is reasonable. Id. at 668. In order to depart under U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3, a sentencing court should first consider increasing the defendant’s Criminal History Category to the next level, and if that is not satisfactory, then each subsequent level should be considered. Id. at 661. Also, Lambert called on a sentencing court to state for the record why the criminal history category provided by the guidelines was inappropriate, and why the category it chooses is appropriate. Id. at 663. However, recognizing the complexities inherent in setting a sentence appropriate to every defendant, “we do not ... require the district court to go through a ritualistic exercise in which it mechanically discusses each criminal history category it rejects en route to the category it selects.” Id.

A. Were The Sentencing Court’s Departure Justifications Adequate?

The sentencing guidelines are an ambitious attempt to impose order on a process that many felt was too chaotic. Sentencing a fellow human being is a demanding process that requires evaluating deeds, demeanor and circumstances that elude quantification. Nevertheless, the guidelines are an effort to achieve that ideal for the sake of equity, and wisely, the guidelines recognize that it is not possible to envision all of the factors that go into a criminal sentence. As such, they permit departures where these extraordinary and unforeseen factors are present. However, in order to avoid making a sham of the noble goal of the guidelines, some degree of articulation is required for a departure to be considered reasonable. The threshold of reasonableness required by the guidelines was not met by the sentencing court in this case.
In justifying its decision to depart, the sentencing court used an economy of speech that left much to the imagination. The actual transcript of the rationale provided by the sentencing court occupies approximately one and one-half, double-spaced, typed pages. ■The sentencing court first announced that it was going to depart, and then stated that if the defendant had been convicted of the two dismissed counts, his Criminal History Category would be V instead of II. Then the sentencing court stated that if the robberies the defendant committed “in the early 1980s” were taken into account, Ashburn’s Criminal History Category would increase to level VI. The sentencing court also made a cryptic allusion to several “attempted robberies” that it was also taking into consideration. Since the sentencing court felt that the defendant’s current Criminal History Category did not adequately reflect these aspects of Ashburn’s background, it decided that a “rather drastic upward departure” was in order.
It is true that Lambert does not require the sentencing court to “go through a ritualistic exercise in which it mechanically discusses each Criminal History Category it rejects en route to the category that it selects.” Id. at 663. Yet what the sentencing court provided here barely amounts to a recitation of the obvious. Stripped of what little preamble the sentencing court provided, the departure amounted to a mention of the defendant’s previous criminal activity and a conclusion that these past acts demonstrate that it should upwardly depart from the guidelines due to the “likelihood the defendant will commit other crimes” and “the seriousness of his past criminal conduct.” These phrases are, almost verbatim, the ones found in the policy statement to U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3: an upward departure “is warranted when the Criminal History Category significantly under-represents the seriousness of the defendant’s criminal history or the likelihood that the defendant will commit further crimes,” (emphasis provided). Essentially, the sentencing court repeated the exact phrases found in the guidelines. I think that the *816reasonableness requirement for departure justifications requires more that a mere recital of the same words that authorize a departure. If that is all that is required, then any explanation for departures is a meaningless exercise, and a noble goal of the sentencing guidelines is in jeopardy.
It is inherent in the exercise of reviewing the adequacy of departure justifications that reasonable minds will differ. However, if the explanations provided by the sentencing court here are reasonable, then virtually nothing can be characterized as unreason- ' able. The cursory justifications provided by the sentencing court in this ease are particularly problematic when one considers the degree of the departure. As the majority noted, Lambert anticipated a narrow class of cases where the departure is so great as to require a detailed explanation of the reasons for the departure. The majority then blithely states that the departure here was not of the magnitude required to invoke the additional Lambert scrutiny. However, Ashburn was given a sentence that was practically triple that which he would have been subjected to under the guidelines. Again, if the departure here was not sufficiently marked to justify a careful accounting of the reasons for the deviation, then I fail to see what kind of departure does justify a Lambert elaboration.
B. Propriety Of The Grounds For The Departure
Not only are the explanations provided by the sentencing court insufficient to justify a departure of such magnitude, but there are also difficulties with the explanations themselves. For example, the sentencing court relied on the “robberies that occurred back in the early 1980s” in raising Ashburn’s already augmented Criminal History Category from level V to level VI. It is assumed that these “early 1980s” robberies the sentencing court referred to were the crimes Ashburn was charged with in his 1984 conviction for armed bank robbery. Ultimately he was convicted of one count of armed bank robbery, and the other charges were dismissed. It is unclear from the sentencing court’s explanation whether it relied on the robbery Ashburn was ultimately convicted on in 1984. If this were the ease, that conviction would have been counted twice, as Ashburn’s pre-sentence report already gave him three criminal history points for this 1984 conviction. Such double counting would be improper, yet one cannot deduce whether the sentencing court relied on the 1984 conviction due to the paucity of its explanations.
There is one other difficulty with the propriety of the reasons asserted by the sentencing court in justifying its upward departure. The sentencing court relied, in part, on the two charges that the plea bargain dismissed, and one other unindicted robbery Ashburn allegedly committed. For each of these items, the sentencing court added three criminal history points. However, by assessing three criminal history points for each of these items, they are being treated as if they were full-fledged convictions. The problem with this approach is that it fails to distinguish between previous convictions (which also merit three criminal history points) and other events ranging from dismissed counts to conduct the prosecution may never have intended to be a basis for an indictment. It is not clear that U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3(e) permits ascribing the same number of criminal history points to past criminal conduct as to prior convictions. If this were the case, then what would be the point in defining what a prior conviction is and basing the Criminal History Category on prior convictions.
IV
In closing, I would like to point out that some of the issues in this case have caused a circuit split. The circuits have split over whether dismissed charges may be used to augment the Criminal History Category. The Second and Tenth Circuits have held that dismissed charges may be so used. See, United States v. Kim, 896 F.2d 678 (2nd Cir.1990); United States v. Zamarripa, 905 F.2d 337 (10th Cir.1990). Conversely, the Third and Ninth Circuits have held that such a use is not permitted. See, United States v. Thomas, 961 F.2d 1110 (3rd Cir.1992); United States v. Castro-Cervantes, 927 F.2d 1079 (9th Cir.1990). Hard cases make bad law. *817All would admit that this case is hard because the defendant is not a sympathetic character. However, the nature of the defendant’s acts seem to overshadow the consideration of sections, commentaries and policy statements of the sentencing guidelines, and the circumvention of this body of rules leads the majority to create bad law. For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.

. It is clear from that record that the sentencing court's departure was based on the inadequacy of the Criminal History Category (U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3(e)), and not the Relevant Conduct Category (U.S.S.G. § lB1.3(b)). Nor could such a departure have been made, since the conviction in this case was for a non-groupable offense; namely robbery (U.S.S.G. § 2B3.1). Non-grou-pable offenses are specifically exempted from inclusion within the Relevant Conduct Category.