Court Opinion

ID: 9853799
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:55:16.361511+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:20:08.216819
License: Public Domain

HAWKINS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I concur in all of the majority Opinion save that concerning the treatment condition (Section II.B), which, in my view, constitutes an impermissible delegation to the probation office. As I read 18 U.S.C. § 3672, only courts are permitted to decide whether, and to what extent, a defendant is required to pay for drug treatment costs.
Although we considered a nearly identical supervised release condition in United States v. Dupas, 419 F.3d 916 (9th Cir.2005), we did so under the plain error standard of review because, unlike Soltero, Dupas failed to make a timely objection to imposition of the condition. Dupas thus left open the question whether imposing this condition constituted legal error. See id. at 924 (concluding that if it was error to impose the condition, that error was not plain). We are now asked to answer the question left open in Dupas: May a district court — consistent with Article Ill’s prohibition against delegating sentencing decisions to probation offices, see United States v. Stephens, 424 F.3d 876, 880-81 (9th Cir.2005) — allow the probation office to decide whether a defendant will be required to pay all or part of the costs of treating his or her substance dependency?
As a general rule, although a sentencing court must determine “whether a defendant must abide by a condition, and how ... a defendant will be subjected to the condition,” the court may “delegate to the probation officer the details of where and when the condition will be satisfied.” Stephens, 424 F.3d at 880. Under our Constitution, the power to punish is exclusively judicial, see Ex parte United States, 242 U.S. 27, 41-42, 37 S.Ct. 72, 61 L.Ed. 129 (1916), and thus the important limitation on a district court’s discretion is that it may not delegate to the probation office the job of “deciding] the nature or extent of the punishment imposed upon a probationer,” United States v. Pruden, 398 F.3d 241, 250 (3d Cir.2005).
In United States v. Warden, 291 F.3d 363 (5th Cir.2002), the Fifth Circuit considered a remarkably similar (though not identical) supervised release condition, which stated: “The defendant will incur the costs associated with [several counseling and treatment] programs, based on ability to pay as determined by the probation officer.” Id. at 364. The court in Warden upheld the condition, explaining that, per the condition’s plain language, “the probation officer[was] given only the responsibility to make a determination as to[the defendant’s] ability to pay, a fact-finding determination commonly made by probation officers in other contexts.” Id. at 366 (emphasis added). The Fifth Circuit thus implicitly drew a distinction be*728tween the sentencing decision itself, which was made by the court when it ordered Warden to pay all the costs associated with his treatment, see id. at 364 (“The defendant will incur the costs .... ” (emphasis added)), and the execution of that sentence, which was left to the probation office based on its assessment (and perhaps its periodic reassessment) of the defendant’s financial situation.
The distinction drawn by the Fifth Circuit makes good sense. As a practical matter, probation offices are already charged with making ability to pay determinations in other contexts,1 and are almost always in possession of the information needed to make these determinations accurately and expediently. See United States Sentencing Guidelines Manual § 5D1.3(c)(15) (2000) (standard supervised release condition requires defendants to “notify the probation office[ ] of any material change[s] in the [their] economic circumstances that might affect [their] ability to pay any unpaid amount of restitution, fines, or special assessments”). I agree there is no sound reason to burden district courts with such matters when the purely administrative task of determining an individual’s ability to pay can be left in the capable hands of institutions that regularly make such determinations.
I also agree that the condition upheld in Warden comports with the Article III requirement that the court, not the probation office, “impose the [defendant’s] punishment,” Ex parte United States, 242 U.S. at 41-42, 37 S.Ct. 72, as well as the 18 U.S.C. § 3672 requirement that the “court[, not the probation office,] ... direct the payment of [treatment costs],” if any. The Warden court made it clear that part of the defendant’s punishment was to pay for all of his own rehabilitative treatment costs — a requirement the defendant was ordered to fulfill unless the probation office later determined he was financially unable to do so. The Warden court could have directed the defendant to pay none of his treatment costs, or to pay only the first $250 of those costs, depending on the circumstances of the particular case. While the court left to the probation office the administrative detail of calculating the defendant’s ability to pay, the court itself decided whether the defendant’s punishment should include payment of some, all, or none of his rehabilitative costs, as Article III and § 3672 required it to do.
If the condition imposed upon Soltero were identical to that imposed in Warden, I would have no trouble upholding it. Unfortunately, where the Warden condition explicitly directed the defendant to pay the full costs of his treatment and delegated only the ability to pay determination to the probation office, the condition here goes a step further and delegates to the probation office responsibility for determining not only the defendant’s ability to pay for court-ordered treatment, but also whether the defendant should be required to pay for some, all, or none of the treatment in the first instance. In essence, the condition here delegates the entire sentencing decision — not just the ministerial “ability to pay” computation — to a non-judicial officer.
While, in practice, this may be only a semantic distinction — as it is likely a probation office faced with the condition in *729Warden and the condition imposed here would reach the same result (i.e., the office would compute the defendant’s ability to pay and then require the defendant to pay treatment costs up to that amount) — deciding whether a defendant should be forced to pay for rehabilitative treatment (and, if so, to what extent) is a decision that is punitive in nature and, thus, Article III requires it to be made by a judge, not a probation officer. Ex parte United States, 242 U.S. at 41-42, 37 S.Ct. 72; Stephens, 424 F.3d at 880-81. I sympathize with the district court’s inclination to delegate an administrative task to an administrative agency whose information about a defendant’s financial situation may be superior to its own; however, the way in which the district court sought to achieve that end here delegates too much.

. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 3664 (requiring probation office to include, in every PSR it prepares for crimes described in 18 U.S.C. § 3663A(c), "information sufficient for the court to exercise its discretion in fashioning a restitution order,” including "information relating to the economic circumstances of each defendant” — i.e., its calculation of the defendant’s ability to pay); United States v. Rearden, 349 F.3d 608, (9th Cir.2003) (discussing probation office's role in ascertaining a defendant's ability to pay a fine).