Court Opinion

ID: 9488414
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:44:34.97798+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:52.577067
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
This case presents a conundrum because of the opaque language employed in 18 U.S.C. § 3145. My two colleagues have made a reasonable effort to resolve the riddle, but have produced neither decisive authority nor compelling exegesis. While I respect their reasoning, I am led to a different conclusion by the nature of the relation of magistrate judges to Article III judges.
One. The statute in question, 18 U.S.C. § 3145, gives few clues. It identifies the court that should review the magistrate judge as the court “having original jurisdiction over the offense.” That is an identification distinctly different from the court referred to by Fed.R.Crim.P. 40, which speaks of “the district court in which the prosecution is pending.” In statutory terms the court “having original jurisdiction” of the offense could be any district court of the United States, see 18 U.S.C. § 3231. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, however, permits prosecution of the offense only in the district wherein the crime has been committed, and the usual rules governing venue and jurisdiction limit the district court to which appeal of a bail order could be made, so that under no circumstances could appeal be taken to any district court at random, but only to the district court having jurisdiction of the defendant. Which district court that is is the question we have to determine.
Two. Rule 40 does not address the question. The Rule provides for the bail papers to go eventually to “the clerk of the district court in which the prosecution is pending.” The Rule does not determine whether the district court which has appointed the magistrate shall first have reviewed the decision. No disharmony exists between this reading of Rule 40 and 18 U.S.C. § 3145.
Three. The opinion of Judge Wallace notes the factors that should be considered by a judicial officer in granting bail as specified in 18 U.S.C. § 3142(g). The great majority of these factors such as the person’s “character, family ties, employment, financial condition, length of residence, community ties” are best determined by the court in which the person is apprehended if the person happens, as is the case here, to be a resident of the district in which apprehended. Congress may well have supposed that this scenario was the more common one and that therefore the district of arrest should be the district to determine bail. Permitting review by the district court to which the magistrate is attached also assures the promptness in bail rulings that the Constitution requires and that 18 U.S.C. § 3145 mandates. In the majority of districts the magistrate is housed in the courthouse where the district court sits. Access to the district court is easy and immediate; promptness is physically facili*1240tated. The district of prosecution retains the ability to modify the bail decision.
Four. The normal system of appellate review is territorial. One goes from a magistrate to the district court which has appointed the magistrate and then to the appellate court of the circuit in which the magistrate and district court exist. If not totally improbable it is at least unlikely that Congress intended to vary the territorial hierarchy and place appellate review in a district court and court of appeals far removed from the place of the original decision.
Five. In connection with the magistrate judge’s hearing of a motion for suppression of evidence, the Supreme Court declared: “the entire process takes place under the district court’s total control and jurisdiction.” United States v. Raddatz, 447 U.S. 667, 681, 100 S.Ct. 2406, 2415, 65 L.Ed.2d 424 (1980). We have cited this language as relevant to the relationship between the district court and a magistrate judge ordering release on bail. United States v. Gebro, 948 F.2d 1118, 1120 (9th Cir.1971). At issue in Gebro was not our question, so Gebro may be distinguished. Nevertheless, Gebro is our closest precedent and it incorporates the traditional understanding of the relationship of the magistrate judge to the district court that appointed the magistrate judge. The phrase “total control” suggests, even if it does not absolutely require, the proximity of the magistrate judge to the district court which is exercising control. To hold, as the majority here holds, that a district court thousands of miles away is the court to exercise “total control” over the magistrate judge seems stranger than any of the alternatives the majority contemplates as flowing from my construction of the statute. Such a sundering of the relationship of the district court and its magistrate judge is, if not unnatural, unusual; its inevitable effect would be to increase the independence of the magistrate judge at the expense of harmony with the district court to which the magistrate judge belongs.
For these reasons I dissent.