Court Opinion

ID: 9492044
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:30:57.628313+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:04.907763
License: Public Domain

MICHAEL DALY HAWKINS, Circuit Judge,
with whom Judges FLETCHER, PREGERSON and THOMAS join,
Concurring in part and Dissenting in part:
I concur. While it is unfortunate and unfair to those making a good faith effort to comply with existing law, the majority correctly concludes that United States v. Rodgers, 466 U.S. 475, 484, 104 S.Ct. 1942, 80 L.Ed.2d 492 (1984), controls and thus we must apply the Supreme Court’s holding in Caron v. United States, 524 U.S. 308, 118 S.Ct. 2007, 141 L.Ed.2d 303 (1998), retroactively to Qualls.
Rodgers represents a departure from a time-honored principle that:
“[T]he required criminal law must have existed when the conduct in issue occurred,” ... must apply to bar retroactive criminal prohibitions emanating from courts as well as from legislatures. If a judicial construction of a criminal statute is “unexpected and indefensible by reference to the law which had been expressed prior to the conduct at issue,” it must not be given retroactive effect.
Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347, 354, 84 S.Ct. 1697, 12 L.Ed.2d 894 (1964) (citation omitted); see also Brown v. Ohio, 432 U.S. 161, 169 n. 8, 97 S.Ct. 2221, 53 L.Ed.2d 187 (1977) (due process prohibits retroactive application of judicial expansion of laws when change in law is “unforeseeable”); Marks v. United States, 430 U.S. 188, 191-92, 97 S.Ct. 990, 51 L.Ed.2d 260 (1977) (when a court interprets a criminal statute to cover behavior not considered unlawful in the past, due process may be violated); United States v. Potts, 528 F.2d 883, 886 (9th Cir.1975) (en banc) (overruling circuit precedent and expanding criminal liability under statute will hot be applied retroactively because of due process considerations).
*1140In rejecting the argument that “because the [1967 precedent] has been on the books in the Eighth Circuit for a number of years a contrary decision by this Court should not be applied retroactively to him,” the Court held that “even if [Rodgers] could establish reliance upon the earlier ... decision, [his argument] would be unavailing since the existence of conflicting cases from other Courts of Appeal made review of that issue by this Court and decision against the position of the respondent reasonably foreseeable.” Rodgers, 466 U.S. at 484, 104 S.Ct. 1942. Rodgers, like Caron, was a case in which the Court’s dispositive interpretation of a statute expanded the scope of criminal liability in some circuits — the overruled Eighth Circuit interpretation would not have allowed Rodgers to be prosecuted.
Rodgers has the effect of requiring that a citizen look not to the established law of the circuit in which he resides, but to the law of the circuit taking the most expansive view of conduct prohibited by a statute, to determine what conduct he may undertake without risk of criminal prosecution until that point in time when the Supreme Court resolves any interpretative disagreement among the circuits. This can have the effect of restraining for years conduct that the Court may ultimately decide was always perfectly legal.
In this case, Qualls could have canvassed state law and “settled circuit law,” see United States v. Walsh, 770 F.2d 1490, 1492 (9th Cir.1985), at the time he took possession of the long guns and concluded under both that his possession was not prohibited or prosecutable behavior. It seems anomalous and Unfair to Qualls that had we overruled United States v. Dahms, 938 F.2d 131 (9th Cir.1991), ourselves in the en banc consideration of his case, we would likely have held we could not apply the corrected statutory interpretation retroactively to Qualls, because of the considerations expressed in Bouie, see United States v. Qualls, 140 F.3d 824, 832 (9th Cir.) (en banc) (Hall, J., concurring) (“Even if wé were to adopt the ‘all or nothing’ approách of our sister circuits, due process would block us from applying this correct reading of the statute retrospectively to Qualls.”), cert. granted and vacated, — U.S. -, 119 S.Ct. 398, 142 L.Ed.2d 323 (1998); yet, because in this instance the Supreme Court has corrected our interpretation, due process considerations are no longer applicable.
The majority’s holding that Rodgers requires us to overrule United States v. Albertini 830 F.2d 985 (9th Cir.1987), compounds unnecessarily the unfairness of the rule imposed on us by Rodgers. We held in Albertini that “[i]f the due process clause is to mean anything, it should mean that a person who holds the latest controlling court opinion declaring his activities constitutionally protected should be able to depend on that ruling to protect like activities from criminal conviction until that opinion is reversed, or at least until the Supreme Court has granted certiorari.” Id. at 989. The majority opinion’s decision to overrule Albertini means that in the future even someone who, in the words of Albertini, “[i]n effect ... obtained a declaratory judgment from this court that the actions in which he engaged were lawful,” id., would still not be entitled to rely on that decision so long as even one other circuit court had come to a contrary conclusion.
On its facts, Qualls does not require that we answer anew the narrow question of Albertini of “whether a person whose conduct has been tried in court and vindicated on appeal can rely upon the court’s decision in repeating the same conduct after receiving the appellate judgment, when the government has either filed a petition for certiorari or still has time to file such a petition, and the Supreme Court has not acted to grant or deny the petition.” Id. at 988. Qualls, like Rodgers and unlike Albertini, involves a defendant who did not demonstrate actual reliance on a prior decision, or even that he had attempted to ascertain the state of the law before choosing his course of action. This court need not decide whether the holding of Alberti*1141ni is trumped by Rodgers to reverse the panel decision in Qualls, and its decision to do so is in no way material to that reversal.
While I concur reluctantly in the result reached in this case, I respectfully dissent from the majority opinion insofar as it concludes that its decision today mandates that Albertini must be overruled.