Court Opinion

ID: 9478439
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:48:55.640702+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:25.709168
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The Federal Aviation Program, which is codified at 49 U.S.C.App. §§ 1301 et seq., makes it the “duty” of the Federal Aviation Administrator to prescribe such rules and regulations as he may find necessary “to provide adequately for national security and safety in air commerce.” 49 U.S.C. App. § 1421(a)(6). It was pursuant to this congressional mandate that the Administrator adopted the regulation providing for suspension or revocation of the license of a pilot who has been convicted of an offense involving alcohol or drugs.
The Federal Youth Corrections Act, prior to its repeal in 1984, gave federal judges discretion to set aside the criminal convictions of young offenders who had been placed on probation under the Act:
“Where a youthful offender has been placed on probation by the court, the court may thereafter, in its discretion, unconditionally discharge such youthful offender from probation prior to the expiration of the maximum period of probation thereto fixed by the court, which discharge shall automatically set aside the conviction, and the court shall issue to the youthful offender a certificate to that effect.” 18 U.S.C. § 5021(b).
The purpose of this provision was to “promote the rehabilitation of those who in the opinion of the sentencing judge show promise of becoming useful citizens, and so [to] avoid the degenerative and needless transformation of many of these young persons into habitual criminals.” H.R.Rep. No. 2979, 81st Cong.2d Sess. (1950), reprinted in [1950] U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 3983.
The dual objectives of Congress — to promote safety in the skies and to promote the rehabilitation of young people who break the law — seldom come into conflict. A straightforward application of the rule relating to safety normally has no implications for the rule relating to rehabilitation, and vice versa. In the case at bar, however, one rule must necessarily be given a broader application than the other. The *621panel majority has selected the rule relating to rehabilitation as the one that is to receive the more expansive interpretation, but on the facts before us, I would make the opposite choice.
Although he qualified as a “youthful” offender, Petitioner Keith Allan Mines was 24 years of age when he committed the offense to which he subsequently pleaded guilty. Mr. Mines owned an airplane in which, as he told the Drug Enforcement Administration agent who arrested him, he had flown from Dallas to Brownsville in search of a load of marijuana. He was carrying more than $6,000, and he told the DEA agent that he had planned to use the money to buy 100 pounds of marijuana which he would then fly back to Dallas. He was apprehended before he could make the purchase, and his plane was seized and sold by the government.
In adopting the regulation under which Mr. Mines’ airline transport pilot’s certificate was revoked, the Federal Aviation Administration said, in effect, this: “We think the skies will be safer if we withhold flying privileges from men who have been caught using airplanes in the illegal drug business.” That is the kind of judgment Congress pays the FAA to make, of course, and such judgments are entitled to considerable deference.
An Administrative Law Judge found, and the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed, that air safety and the public interest required affirmance of the FAA order revoking Mr. Mines’ pilot’s certificate. I cannot say — and I do not understand Mr. Mines seriously to argue — that the safety determinations contained in this record lack factual support. Mr. Mines’ argument, rather, boils down to the proposition that the interests of safety must yield to the interests of rehabilitation, because that is what the Youth Corrections Act requires. I do not find the argument persuasive.
Nothing in the Youth Corrections Act or in its legislative history compels the conclusion that a pilot who has been convicted on a drug charge may require the Safety Board to find that it is safe to let him fly airplanes merely because the sentencing judge is of the “opinion” that the pilot shows “promise” of becoming a useful citizen. Nothing in the Act compels the conclusion that the Safety Board must ignore the record of a conviction which, although subsequently set aside for rehabilitative purposes, did take place as a matter of historic fact.
Unlike the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (see Doe v. Webster, 606 F.2d 1226 (D.C.Cir.1979)), this court does not read the Youth Corrections Act as entitling the offender to have the record of his conviction physically expunged. See United States v. Doe, 556 F.2d 391, 393 (6th Cir.1977), where, noting that “there is no provision in the Act which authorizes or requires obliteration of the court record of conviction,” we upheld a district court’s refusal to order the record of the defendant’s conviction expunged after the conviction had been set aside under the Act. If the physical record of the vacated conviction must remain in existence, it is far from self-evident that there are no uses whatever to which the record may properly be put by officials who have no responsibility for the operation of the justice system, but who do have a duty to provide for air safety.
It is clear, to be sure, that a court may not vacate a youthful offender’s conviction and then treat the beneficiary of this discretionary act as a convicted felon for purposes of determining guilt under the statute making it a crime for convicted felons to receive or possess firearms. United States v. Fryer, 545 F.2d 11 (6th Cir.1976). But the question in the case at bar is not whether a court may find Mr. Mines guilty of that sort of status offense on the strength of a drug conviction which the court itself has previously set aside. The question, rather, is whether safety officials may revoke Mr. Mines’ flying license on the strength of a drug conviction which did in fact occur and which, in their judgment as safety officials having nothing to do with enforcement of the criminal laws, suggests that Mr. Mines is not the sort of *622person who can safely be accorded the privilege of piloting airplanes.
The two questions are very different— and to my mind, the fact that Mr. Mines could not have been sent to jail under the federal firearms law does not require that he be sent back into the skies as one who has been found to meet the stringent safety requirements of the Federal Aviation Administration. I see no logical inconsistency between the opinion of the sentencing judge that Mr. Mines shows promise of becoming a useful citizen and the opinion of the Safety Board that he still does not belong in the cockpit of an airplane.
It is worth noting, finally, that while the Federal Aviation Program is still on the statute books, the Youth Corrections Act is not. Congress repealed the latter statute effective October 12, 1984, one year after Mr. Mines was convicted. Pub.L. 98-473, Title II, § 218(a)(8), 98 Stat. 2027. Because Mr. Mines had been sentenced under the Youth Corrections Act, I assume that the sentencing court was correct in believing that it retained authority to set the conviction aside under 18 U.S.C. § 5021(b) even after the repeal of that section. The court did set the conviction aside, in any event, on August 26, 1986. The Safety Board issued its opinion and order on July 31, 1987, almost three years after the Youth Corrections Act had been repealed. Given that chronology, I am not at all sure that Congress would wish us at this late date to vindicate Mr. Mines’ interest in escaping the “social stigma and loss of economic opportunity that in this society accompany the ‘ex-con’ label,” Doe v. Webster, supra, 606 F.2d at 1234, when that vindication comes at the expense of a safety program which the elected representatives of “this society” have never seen fit to jettison.
I would affirm the order of the Safety Board.