Court Opinion

ID: 9439057
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 06:19:56.649646+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:26:07.739757
License: Public Domain

RANDOLPH, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I would send the case back for resentencing before a different district judge.
The defendant did not come clean with the probation officer, but that was of no moment under this strange plea agreement. By its terms, the government’s promise to speak in favor of a downward adjustment for the defendant’s acceptance of responsibility did not depend on the defendant’s telling the truth to the probation officer, or to the district court. The government did not uphold its end of the bargain and so my colleagues rightly conclude that the defendant must have another sentencing in which the government fulfills its obligation. The defendant is entitled to specific performance of the government’s end of the plea bargain. Santobello v. New York, 404 U.S. 257, 262, 92 S.Ct. 495, 498-99, 30 L.Ed.2d 427 (1971). The only serious question is who should do the resentencing, the original district judge or a new one.
Like my colleagues, I cannot gather much guidance on the remedial question from Santobello. The first prosecutor promised Santobello not to recommend any particular sentence; a substitute prosecutor then urged the state judge to imprison Santobello for the maximum term. The judge ordered the maximum sentence in light of Santobello’s long criminal history and said that the prosecutor’s recommendation played no role whatever in his sentencing judgment. See 404 U.S. at 259, 92 S.Ct. at 497. If one took the judge at his word, sending the ease back to him for resentencing would have been senseless.* And so the Supreme Court ordered any resentencing of Santobello to be done by *90a different judge. I suppose this avoided making the prosecutor’s breach a clear harmless error and preserved the possibility that Santobello might receive some benefit from the prosecutor’s promised silence.
What carries the day for me is not the reasoning given for the Santobello remedy— there was none — or the remedy itself, which may have been prompted by the state judge’s remarks, but the desirability of having a fixed rule in these cases, one easy to understand and easy to administer. Sending every defendant back to the original judge would, of course, be such a rule. But no one has urged it because there are some cases deserving of assignment to a new sentencing judge, a point on which all of us agree. I therefore come to the following position: in all cases in' which the government breaches a plea agreement by doing something to influence the judge against the defendant in sentencing, the case should be remanded to a different judge for resentencing. (I would reserve an exception for breaches so harmless that we would not vacate the sentence, see Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 52(a).)
The majority has a different approach. It wants to winnow out those cases not warranting reassignment on remand. This is to be done by applying another one of these multipronged “tests” in which the court of appeals balances imponderables — in other words, by applying no real test at all. The alternative I favor — always remanding to another judge — may not be a perfect solution. The new sentencing judge will probably learn of what the government said (but should not have said) at the initial sentencing and may have as much trouble keeping that information out of mind as would the original sentencing judge. The status quo thus may be impossible to restore fully. But at least we can make the attempt without trying to apply some standardless “standard.”

 The Court did say that it "need not reach the question whether the sentencing judge would or would not have been influenced had he known all the details of the negotiations for the plea.” 404 U.S. at 262, 92 S.Ct. at 499. This seems to me a red herring. So far as I can tell, nothing in the plea agreement required either party to inform the judge of "the details of the negotiations.” See 404 U.S. at 258, 92 S.Ct. at 496-97.