Court Opinion

ID: 9481350
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:16:26.34763+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:15.582182
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
with whom CUDAHY, POSNER, COFFEY, and MANION, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting.
Carolyn Kay Poff is mentally disturbed, in part as a result of extended sexual abuse by her father. One manifestation of this disturbance is that at her (deceased) father’s command, Poff sends threatening letters to public officials. Poff has received increasingly stiff sentences for these threats, although no one believes that she is dangerous. She is a pest, a gnat buzzing in the ear of the Secret Service. My colleagues hold that the district judge nonetheless is forbidden in passing sentence to consider the mental condition that impels Poff to send these letters. Although a textual argument supports this conclusion, we should not attribute this heartlessness to the Sentencing Commission unless we must — and we needn’t.
Poff asked the district judge to reduce her sentence on the authority of U.S.S.G. 5K2.13 (policy statement), which provides: *594Threatening public officials is a “crime of violence” for purposes of the career offender guideline, U.S.S.G. 4B1.1. Is the “nonviolent offense” to which § 5K2.13 refers the contrapositive of “a crime of violence”? If “non-violent offense” and “crime of violence” are exclusive, then § 5K2.13 does not authorize a reduction.
*593If the defendant committed a non-violent offense while suffering from significantly reduced mental capacity not resulting from voluntary use of drugs or other intoxicants, a lower sentence may be warranted to reflect the extent to which reduced mental capacity contributed to the commission of the offense, provided that the defendant’s criminal history does not indicate a need for incarceration to protect the public.
*594Guideline 4B1.2 defines the term “crime of violence”. Policy statement 5K2.13 uses the term “non-violent offense”, which it does not define. Statement 5K2.13 is not accompanied by notes. The majority concludes that a “crime of violence” cannot be a “non-violent offense”. It is jarring to select a high sentence level on the ground that a crime is one “of violence” only to turn around and depart on the ground that the defendant committed a “non-violent offense”. Silence on the Commission’s part is insufficient, my colleagues believe, to require such a contradiction, and the majority’s thoughtful opinion makes a strong argument for that position.
Yet it is an accident that our case involves a repeat offender. If the majority is right, § 5K2.13 is unavailable for a first offense as well as a third, although there is then no incongruity. Does § 4B1.2 make § 5K2.13 unavailable for all criminal threats (and a raft of other offenses, indeed for the bulk of offenses)? It would have been easy to write § 5K2.13 to say that the judge may depart unless the defendant committed a “crime of violence” as § 4B1.2 defines it; instead the Commission selected different formulations. Although it laid out a detailed meaning for “crime of violence” in § 4B1.2, it did not provide so much as a cross-reference in § 5K2.13, a curious omission if the Commission meant to link these phrases so tightly that they are mutually exclusive.
Courts often say that different language in different places conveys different meanings. Pittston Coal Group v. Sebben, 488 U.S. 105, 115, 109 S.Ct. 414, 421, 102 L.Ed.2d 408 (1988); United States v. Gaggi, 811 F.2d 47, 56 (2d Cir.1987); Tafoya v. Department of Justice, 748 F.2d 1389, 1391-92 (10th Cir.1984), quoting from Lankford v. LEAA, 620 F.2d 35, 36 (4th Cir.1980) (Haynsworth, J.); Seeber v. Washington, 96 Wash.2d 135, 634 P.2d 303, 306 (1981). Most of the time this approach overstates the precision with which a legislature chooses its words; drafters may not know that a similar phrase exists elsewhere, and if they know they may believe that the two are equivalent. The guidelines and their associated commentary were written as a unit, however, and with greater than customary attention to the relation among sections. United States v. Pinto, 875 F.2d 143, 144 (7th Cir.1989). Amendments numbering 359 over three years attest to a continuous effort to make the text and notes an integrated whole. When it makes sense to attribute different meanings to different phrases in such a detailed package, a court should do so. United States v. Wong Kim Bo, 472 F.2d 720, 722 (5th Cir.1972); cf. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. v. Russell, 473 U.S. 134, 146, 105 S.Ct. 3085, 3092, 87 L.Ed.2d 96 (1985).
“Crime of violence” and “non-violent offense” have a root word in common but readily may take meanings other than as opposites. As the Commission was at pains to establish in § 4B1.2, whether a crime is one “of violence” depends on its elements and not on the defendant’s conduct, so that an unrealized prospect of violence makes the crime one of violence. Cf. Taylor v. United States, — U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 2143, 2159-60, 109 L.Ed.2d 607 (1990). This is an abnormal sense, a term of art. It took a detailed definition to make it so. Then comes § 5K2.13, in which “non-violent offense” appears without elaboration or cross-reference. Best to read these words in their ordinary sense rather than as tied to the term of art in § 4B1.2. A “non-violent offense” in ordinary legal (and lay) understanding is one in which mayhem did not occur. The prospect of violence (the “heartland” of the offense, in the guidelines’ argot) sets the presumptive range; when things turn out better than they might, departure is permissible.
Consider why “significantly reduced mental capacity” ever should be a ground for lenience. It is not that persons suffering from conditions short of legal insanity *595are not dangerous; they may be very dangerous and, because of the mental condition, effectively undeterrable. A hefty sentence may be appropriate simply because it incapacitates and so reduces the likelihood of further offenses. When the disturbed person’s conduct is non-violent, however, incapacitation is less important. Section 5K2.13 read as a whole, including the final reference to the “need for incarceration to protect the public”, says that when incapacitation is not an important justification for punishment, mental condition may be the basis of a departure. Persons who voluntarily use drugs, and whose capacity is “diminished” by their own choice, also are dangerous, and legal threats may induce them to abandon their habits; § 5K2.13 therefore excludes them expressly. United States v. Fonner, 920 F.2d 1330, 1334-35 (7th Cir.1990), in which the threat was accompanied by a history of (real) violence, illustrates a circumstance under which the “need for incarceration to protect the public” bars a departure under § 5K2.13. Poff s circumstances differ, and the Commission has not required judges to treat the innocuous threatener and the murderous one identically.
The criminal justice system long has meted out lower sentences to persons who, although not technically insane, are not in full command of their actions. The Sentencing Commission based its guidelines on the common practices of judges, which it attempted to make more uniform without fundamentally altering the criteria influencing sentences. Under both the desert approach to sentencing and the deterrence approach, mental states short of insanity are important. Persons who find it difficult to control their conduct do not — considerations of dangerousness to one side — deserve as much punishment as those who act maliciously or for gain. Poff is a victim of her father’s abuse, and an expert witness concluded that it continues to influence her acts. Determining the cause of mental conditions is more a black art than a science; a district judge need not accept such testimony. But if the judge credits it, then Poff’s mental state is a lingering consequence of criminal acts committed against her. It is a shame when her father’s crimes continue to take their toll by leading to acts that in turn yield long incarceration. Some punishment is essential; the district judge found that Poff can be influenced by legal sanctions and is intellectually (although not always emotionally) capable of conforming to the law’s demands. But 51 months in prison without possibility of parole is a harsh sentence for someone known to be all bark and no bite, and whose letters therefore do not siphon resources from the investigation of those posing genuine danger. Because legal sanctions are less effective with persons suffering from mental abnormalities, a system of punishment based on deterrence also curtails its sanction. See Gary S. Becker, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, 76 J.Pol.Econ. 169 (1968), reprinted in his The Economic Approach to Human Behavior 39, 59-60 (1976). Scarce resources and prison space achieve greater deterrence when deployed against those who are most responsive to the legal system’s threats and who pose the greatest danger if not deterred.
On either a deterrent or a desert rationale, then, appropriate punishment for a ■ person such as Poff is not as heavy as that for someone who threatens the President with intent to carry through. Ironically, we may be sure that Poff is harmless because of her 20-year history of empty threats, the very circumstance causing the guidelines to call her a career criminal. Under the court’s reading of § 5K2.13 Poff must be treated the same as a terrorist whose plan was thwarted only by chance. I am reluctant to impute that conclusion to the Sentencing Commission when it did not say that “crime of violence” and “non-violent offense” are mutually exclusive. The reasons behind § 5K2.13 combine with the presumption that different terms in a carefully drafted code such as the guidelines connote different things to lead me to conclude that “non-violent offense” refers to crimes that in the event did not entail violence. When prison is not justified by the need to incapacitate the defendant, § 5K2.13 is available.
*596Some of the district judge’s discussion suggests that he would not have departed even if § 5K2.13 were available. Yet he gave Poff the minimum sentence of her guideline range, and it is not out of the question that he would have shaved the sentence further had he believed that § 5K2.13 allowed it. Whether to use the power under § 5K2.13 is the judge’s decision. We ought to say that he possesses the discretion to decide.