Court Opinion

ID: 9486583
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:53:30.52286+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:48.892176
License: Public Domain

HEANEY, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring and dissenting.
I join all of the court’s opinion but section C on family responsibilities. I particularly agree with the view expressed in footnote one that deference should be given to the district court’s finding that the circumstances of .a particular case make it unusual or out of the ordinary. Whether or not one apples that notion to the family circumstances in this case, I believe the facts warrant the *922district court’s decision to depart on the basis of Goffs family responsibilities. Although we must remand for resentencing because of the court’s consideration of factors that I agree are not available under our precedents, I believe the district court should be allowed to consider departing solely on the basis of family circumstances. It is on that basis that I am compelled to dissent.
This is not simply an ordinary case of a family suffering whatever tangible or intangible harm ordinarily accompanies incarceration of one of its members. The district court found that Goffs presence was absolutely necessary to his family’s well-being, and departed on that basis. The issue is not whether Goffs family will suffer financially, but whether his family responsibilities are extraordinary. His wife, who is thirty years his junior, was found by the district court to be entirely disabled and unable to care for their children. She has been declared totally disabled by the Social Security Administration due to her serious emotional and psychological problems. In addition to his disabled wife, Goff is responsible for three young children. At the time of sentencing, his children were eleven years old, four years old, and six months old. Health care personnel familiar with the situation stated in no- uncertain terms that his wife is unable to care for the children.
This leaves the question whether these circumstances are any different than those of a single-parent family, which, unbelievably to me, we have held to be absolutely ordinary, apparently without exception. The district court believed that these circumstances are sufficiently different to warrant departure, and I cannot conclude as a matter of law that this finding was error. In fact, I believe that these circumstances fully support departure, and we should simply remand to the district court to determine the degree.
Were Goffs appeal being heard in the Second or Tenth Circuits, the government would practically be forced to concede the propriety of departure under these circumstances. See United States v. Johnson, 964 F.2d 124, 127-30 (2d Cir.1992); United States v. Pena, 930 F.2d 1486, 1494-95 (10th Cir.1991). In the First and Third Circuits, the precedents lean toward allowing this departure. See United States v. Sclamo, 997 F.2d 970, 973-74 (1st Cir.1993); United States v. Gaskill, 991 F.2d 82 (3d Cir.1993). Our precedents are, of course, much stingier in the discretion we choose to allow the district courts in these matters, but even under those precedents, which admittedly do not allow departure for several of the reasons relied on by the district court, departure based on the defendant’s unusual family responsibilities is warranted. The strongest Eighth Circuit case against departure is probably United States v. Harrison, 970 F.2d 444 (8th Cir.1992), but in that case the court specifically noted that most of the assertions involving the other family members’ inability to care for the young children in question were undocumented. See id. at 448 n. 4. In this case, the district court had ample evidence on which to base its findings that Goffs wife was herself disabled and that she was therefore unable to care for their children. Goffs family responsibilities are unusual, and rather than simply follow our existing precedents on this question, the court today closes another avenue through which district courts might otherwise rightfully exercise their discretion in sentencing.
Congress did not intend to make calculating machines of our district judges, yet time and time again this court has seen fit to remove discretion from the district courts, where it is subject to review by this court, and transfer that discretion to prosecutors whose actions remain utterly unreviewable. Today the court pulls another plank from beneath the district judges, mandating that they swim in the sea of the guidelines, instructing them that any attempt to reach higher ground and exercise their informed judgment about the facts of a defendant’s life will be frustrated by this court, and again I am compelled to dissent.