Court Opinion

ID: 9497138
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:44:25.616355+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:01.602030
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I fully concur in the judgment and in Judge Sutton’s opinion for the court. Perhaps it would not be amiss, however, for me to add a word on the question of our standard of review, given the tension between my unqualified assertion in United States v. Powell, 823 F.2d 996, 1001 (6th Cir.1987), that “[w]e review a district court’s refusal to dismiss an indictment only for abuse of discretion” and my unqualified concurrence in Judge Rosen’s opinion in United States v. DeZarn, 157 F.3d 1042 (6th Cir.1998), which asserted that “[t]he sufficiency of the indictment is reviewed de novo.” Id at 1046.
I suppose a pedant could claim that Powell is not directly in point here, the case at bar not being one that gives us occasion to “review a district court’s refusal to dismiss ah indictment....” But were it not for the fact that, as Judge Sutton has generously pointed out, “an erroneous legal determination is always an abuse of discretion,” see United States v. Taylor, 286 F.3d 303, 305 (6th Cir.2002), I would be hard pressed to deny that the logic of my statement in Powell is at odds with the logic of Judge Rosen’s statement in De-Zarn. And I am at a loss to know what I could have been thinking of when I said what I said in Powell; the Powell statement (which I must have expunged from my memory in the ensuing decade) now strikes me as wide of the mark, while Judge Rosen’s statement in DeZarn strikes me now — as it did when I concurred in it — as right on target.