Court Opinion

ID: 9483053
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:09:03.935507+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:23.005697
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
The sentencing guideline for arson through October 1990 established a basé offense level of 6, increased by 14 levels if the defendant “recklessly endangered the safety of another”, § 2K1.4(b)(2), or 18 if he “knowingly created a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury”, § 2K1.4(b)(l). “Reckless” is a slippery term, which the Sentencing Commission discarded when promulgating a new arson guideline effective November 1, 1990. See amendment 330. The replacement gives a base level of 20 if the offense “(A) created a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury to any person other than a participant in the offense; (B) involved the destruction or attempted destruction of a structure other than a dwelling; or (C) endangered a dwelling, or a structure other than a dwelling”. U.S.S.G. § 2K1.4(a)(2). The base offense level is 24 if the substantial risk is created “knowingly” or the arson involves the actual or attempted destruction of a dwelling. U.S.S.G. § 2K1.4(a)(l).
Under the current version of § 2K1.4(a)(2) this is an easy case. Foutris hired someone to torch a bar, which at a minimum “endangered ... a structure other than a dwelling”. Foutris was sentenced in May 1991, and judges must use the guidelines “that are in effect on the date the defendant is sentenced”. 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(4). Yet everyone, including the judge, believed that the old version of § 2K1.4 applies, and the brief for the *1164United States asserts that “[t]he guideline in effect at the time of the defendant’s sentencing contained a base offense level of 6”. Did no one read the guidelines carefully? Although some changes in the guidelines after the date of the crime may create problems under the ex post facto clause, the change in § 2K1.4 does not, see United States v. Bader, 956 F.2d 708 (7th Cir.1992), if only because the current version, with a base level of 20, comes to the same thing as the former version with a base of 6 plus 14 for recklessness, given our conclusion that “[i]n this day and age, the arson of an urban structure — whether residential or commercial — is virtually a per .se reckless endangerment of others.” United States v. Golden, 954 F.2d 1413, 1417 (7th Cir.1992).
Under the former version of §■ 2K1.4 this is anything but an easy case, if Golden be put aside. It illustrates the obstacles to uniform, predictable sentences under the guidelines. Many provisions of the guidelines present knotty but tractable issues. Did the defendant act “knowingly”? “Intentionally”? Did the defendant possess more than a kilogram of cocaine? How about his partners in crime? Former § 2K1.4(b)(2) uses familiar terms such as “recklessly” but presents a different kind of question altogether, and a more difficult one. Just how dangerous is arson in general, or in the case at hand? To answer such questions judges must either hear from experts or turn to data about arson, and then make adjustments that depend on technical issues such as how fires transmit heat. Although judges are comfortable consulting their intuition, facts are. the proper guide to scientific and technical matters. “Common sense” told people that the Earth is the center of the universe and that the four elements are earth, air, fire, and water. When the United States declared its independence, no one in the world knew that oxygen had anything to do with fire (the prime suspect was “phlogiston”). Introspection is a poor source of “information” when liberty hangs in the balance; judicial guesstimates also defeat the purpose of the guidelines in producing uniform sentences, for one judge’s untutored private views about arson are unlikely to match another’s. Cf. Brewer v. Aiken, 935 F.2d 850, 861-62 (7th Cir.1991) (concurring opinion).
How dangerous is arson of a building known to be unoccupied? The record contains no evidence, and the lawyers have presented their diametrically opposed, but equally ignorant, views on that subject. According to the National Fire Protection Association, the facts for arsons of buildings are:
[[Image here]]
These figures exceed those in the Uniform Crime Reports, which lists only 46,-216 structural arsons in 1990, Crime in the United States 43 (1991), because the FBI counts only blazes known to be arson, while the NFPA includes fires of suspicious origin. But the difference does not matter for current purposes. About 100 firefighters perish on the job annually. One hundred two died in 1990, only 44 of these at the scene of a fire. Arthur E. Washburn, Paul R. LeBlanc & Rita F. Fahy, Fire Fighter Fatalities 1990, in NFPA Journal (July/Aug.1991). “Sixteen fire fighters ... died as a result of incendiary and suspicious fires — 4 while responding to or returning from such fires, 9 at structure fires, and 2 at wildland fires.” Id. at 12.
Adding 14 firefighters’ deaths (excluding the two wildland fires) to the NFPA’s data on civilian deaths implies that each arson led to 0.0075 deaths in 1990. That number overstates risks for arsons such as Fou-tris’s, however, because it includes deaths from fires set in buildings occupied at the time. Eighty-seven of the 715 deaths in 1990 occurred in the blaze at the Happy Land social club in New York. Such deaths,must be subtracted to get a handle on the hazards of arsons at empty buildings. For the dangers in an unoccupied building are of a different kind: risks to firefighters trying to extinguish the flames and risks to adjacent buildings that may be populated. Despite what we assumed in *1165Golden, even in urban areas fire rarely affects adjacent buildings. A study by the Dallas Fire Department reveals that of the 530 fires in that city in early 1979, only 9 spread beyond the original structure. Measuring Fire Spread 9 (U.S. Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service 1979).
No data I could locate show how many of the deaths could be traced to fires started in unoccupied buildings. The NFPA has a database from which an expert could extract that information, but it is not published. A safe estimate is that the hazard is at least an order of magnitude less for arson in an unoccupied building, so that such a fire is- associated with fewer than 0.001 deaths and about five times that many injuries. (The ratio of fire injuries to fire deaths has been stable at five for many years. See 1991 Statistical Abstract of the United States Table 346.)
Aggregate data do not conclude the judicial task, for fires differ in their propensity to spread. Wooden buildings burn much more readily than masonry ones, and because structural fires spread more by radiated heat than by embers, the size and location of openings in the walls are important. See, e.g., F.R. Steward, Basic Principles of Radiative Transfer, in Heat Transfer in Fires 277 (Perry L. Blackshear ed. 1974); Daniel Gross, Data Sources for Parameters Used in Predictive Modeling of Fire Growth and Smoke Spread (U.S. Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, Center for Fire Research 1985).
Foutris planned a fire in a one-story bar with double masonry walls. The only adjacent building, a one-story hardware store, was of similar construction. Radiative heat transfer would have been low, making it less likely than the norm that the fire would spread — if indeed a fire set the way Foutris wanted, with the alcohol in whiskey and vodka as the principal accelerant, had much chance of doing significant damage even to the bar. The residence closest to the bar was on the other side of the hardware store, and by the time a fire could engulf the hardware store and leap to the apartments, these persons would have been alerted. So the risk in Foutris’s plans was less than the norm of one death per 1,000 fires in unoccupied buildings. Because an act is reckless in the sense of criminal law when it reflects indifference to a substantial risk — see Model Penal Code § 2.02(2)(c) (1985), providing that one who “consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk” acts recklessly — it is hard to say that acts creating hazards one time in a thousand are “reckless” for purposes of the sentencing guidelines unless we take the view that all dangerous acts that lack social benefits are “reckless.” In that event, however, there would be no reason to treat “recklessness” as an aggravating factor in the criminal law, for arson is itself an unjustifiable and dangerous act. So the Sentencing Commission came to realize when it eliminated recklessness as a separate factor in sentencing.
Because the parties have argued this case to us under superseded guidelines, it makes little difference how we resolve their dispute. Neither side presented facts, and in a world of speculation the district judge’s guess is as good as any. On the authority of Golden, I concur in the judgment affirming the sentence. In litigation under the guidelines, however, lawyers’ hot air is no substitute for facts.