Court Opinion

ID: 9553008
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 19:20:25.867255+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:29:29.428866
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Chief Judge,
with whom
POSNER and TINDER, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting.
Begay v. United States, - U.S. -, 128 S.Ct. 1581, 170 L.Ed.2d 490 (2008), called into question many of this court’s decisions interpreting U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(2) and similar recidivism provisions, such as 18 U.S.C. § 16(b) and § 924(e)(2)(B)(ii). Last January the court set for argument before two panels several appeals that presented issues affected by Begay. As it happens, the six judges on those panels do not agree on how Begay applies, so proposed opinions in two cases were circulated to the full court under Circuit Rule 40(e). We decided to resolve the disputes through this circulation, without argument en banc. The approach proposed by the panel in Woods has the support of a majority and becomes the law of the circuit. I disagree with some aspects of the panel’s analysis and would proceed differently.
The career-offender portion of the Sentencing Guidelines, like 18 U.S.C. § 16 and § 924(e)(2)(B), counts toward the total of the defendant’s “crimes of violence” or “violent felonies” any conviction of an offense that has as an element the use or attempted use of force against the person of another. These provisions also include a residual category. The Guidelines define as a “crime of violence” any offense that:
is burglary of a dwelling, arson, or extortion, involves use of explosives, or otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.
U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(2). Begay understands the “otherwise involves ...” language of § 924(e)(2)(B)(ii) to cover only crimes “similar” to burglary, arson, extortion, and explosives offenses in the sense that they involve “purposeful, violent, and aggressive conduct”. 128 S.Ct. at 1586. This led the Court to hold in Begay that drunk driving does not qualify, because the driver does not set out to harm anyone, and in Chambers v. United States, - U.S. -, 129 S.Ct. 687, 172 L.Ed.2d 484 (2009), that failure to report to prison and walkaway escapes are not violent felonies. See also United States v. Templeton, 543 F.3d 378 (7th Cir.2008) (anticipating the holding of Chambers).
Begay creates problems of classification. It may be easy to tell when a person’s conduct was violent and aggressive, but whether a crime of conviction entails such conduct can be tricky, because it is necessary to think through the many varieties of behavior within a law’s domain. States did not write their statutes with Begay in mind. Many laws penalize categories of activity, some violent and some not. Or they may penalize reckless conduct. Criminal recklessness is a form of intent, see Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994), but particular laws may employ that mental state in idiosyncratic ways. Still other laws may apply a negligence standard to one element of an offense, recklessness to a second, knowledge to a third, and purpose to a fourth. There are many thousands of state and federal criminal stat*414utes. The judiciary needs a list or a set of categories rather than an open-ended standard, but for now we must make do.
Begay requires us to ask whether a crime that poses a “serious potential risk of physical injury” to another person is also sufficiently intentional, violent, and aggressive that it is similar to burglary and arson. Woods concludes that homicide does not meet this definition.
How can homicide not be an intentional, violent, and aggressive act? How can it be that burglary is a crime of violence, even though people rarely are injured in burglaries, and homicide is not, even though a person’s death is an element of the offense? The panel’s answer is that involuntary manslaughter, though treated in Illinois as a form of homicide (effectively third-degree murder), see 720 ILCS 5/9-3, has a definition broad enough to include some killings in which the mental element is recklessness rather than knowledge or purpose. Illinois calls the offense “involuntary” manslaughter when the defendant, though intending to perform the acts that end in death, does not want the victim to die, but is recklessly indifferent to the risk of death. This causes a problem for classification because federal recidivism statutes (and similar parts of the Guidelines) ask what crime the defendant has been convicted of, not what he did in fact. That categorical approach sends us to the state statute’s text rather than the facts of the defendant’s conduct.
The panel in Woods understands the categorical approach to ask whether a crime is “divisible”: unless all (or almost all) varieties of conduct within a law’s domain meet the Begay standard, then any conviction under the statute must be deemed one for a nonviolent offense. As it is possible to commit involuntary manslaughter in Illinois without purposeful, violent, and aggressive conduct, the panel concludes that no conviction for involuntary manslaughter may be the basis of a federal recidivism enhancement. We know that Woods was violent toward the victim. He concedes dropping and then shaking the baby, who died as a result. But because the drop may have been thoughtless, and conviction did not require proof that Woods intended the baby’s death, the panel holds that his federal sentence is too high.
I think that the sentencing judge should be allowed to look at the charging papers and plea colloquy in the criminal prosecution whether or not the statute is “divisible” in the panel’s sense. To see why, it is essential to start with Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575, 110 S.Ct. 2143, 109 L.Ed.2d 607 (1990), which established the categorical approach to recidivist enhancements.
Taylor holds, and Shepard v. United States, 544 U.S. 13, 125 S.Ct. 1254, 161 L.Ed.2d 205 (2005), reiterates, that the question to ask is: of what crime does the defendant stand convicted? Taylor holds that federal recidivist statutes use a charge-offense rather than a real-offense approach. The Justices wrote: “Congress intended the sentencing court to look only to the fact that the defendant had been convicted of crimes falling within certain categories, and not to the facts underlying the prior convictions.” 495 U.S. at 600, 110 S.Ct. 2143. But how can one tell what the conviction represents, when a single state crime covers acts both within and without the federal domain?
Taylor concluded that the federal statute covered what it called “generic burglary”: only entering a residence with the intent to commit a felony is the crime of “burglary” for a federal recidivist enhancement. Some states have a statute with these elements. Other states use lists, as in “any person who enters a tent, railroad *415car, chicken coop, or dwelling with intent to commit a felony within” commits burglary. The panel treats statutes with lists as divisible. Still a third kind of statute provides that “any person who enters a building with intent to commit a felony therein” commits burglary. There’s nothing “divisible” about that law: the word “building” covers barns, ships, and dwellings. Yet Taylor says that here, too, the sentencing judge may look at the charging papers or guilty-plea colloquy to see whether the person was convicted of entering a house rather than a barn. A “divisibility” principle that excludes this aspect of Taylor is incompatible with the Supreme Court’s understanding.
Here is how the Justices summed up them conclusion:
We think the only plausible interpretation of § 924(e) (2) (B) (ii) is that, like the rest of the enhancement statute, it generally requires the trial court to look only to the fact of conviction and the statutory definition of the prior offense. This categorical approach, however, may permit the sentencing court to go beyond the mere fact of conviction in a narrow range of cases where a jury was actually required to find all the elements of generic burglary. For example, in a State whose burglary statutes include entry of an automobile as well as a building, if the indictment or information and jury instructions show that the defendant was charged only with a burglary of a building, and that the jury necessarily had to find an entry of a building to convict, then the Government should be allowed to use the conviction for enhancement.
495 U.S. at 602, 110 S.Ct. 2143 (footnote omitted). The Justices observed that Missouri had seven different burglary statutes, some with subdivisions or lists and some without. 495 U.S. at 578-79 n. 1, 110 S.Ct. 2143. They did not suggest that the difference mattered; instead the Justices adopted the approach quoted above as the approach to all seven. So instead of asking whether a state law is “divisible,” we should ask whether the jury (or judge) necessarily found all the elements required to classify the crime as “violent” for federal purposes.
What Taylor excludes is calling something “burglary” because that is what the defendant did, even if he was convicted of something else (such as unlawful entry of a residence, after a plea bargain that excluded the “with intent to commit a felony therein” element). And Shepard blocks using anything other than the charging papers and plea colloquy to establish what the defendant was convicted of. Neither opinion makes “divisibility” indispensable to classification. And, as far as I can see, no other circuit treats “divisibility” as a sine qua non. In this circuit the word first appeared in United States v. Mathews, 453 F.3d 830, 833 (7th Cir.2006), which used it as shorthand for Taylor's categorical approach rather than as a stand-alone requirement. Two other circuits have used the word, though neither has treated divisibility as a legal requirement. See Dulal-Whiteway v. Department of Homeland Security, 501 F.3d 116 (2d Cir.2007); Huerta-Guevara v. Ashcroft, 321 F.3d 883 (9th Cir.2003).
Woods suggests that decisions after Taylor create a divisibility requirement, even though the Justices themselves have not used the word or its functional equivalent. Yet Nijhawan v. Holder, - U.S. -, 129 S.Ct. 2294, 174 L.Ed.2d 22 (2009), shows that Taylor’s original analysis remains the Court’s approach. Nijhawan posed the question whether immigration officials may consider the size of a fraud when implementing 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(iii), which allows removal *416based on certain felony convictions, when the dollar value of the fraud is not an element of the offense. The court of appeals gave an affirmative answer; a dissenting opinion invoked a “divisibility” requirement in support of an argument that value must be ignored. Nijhawan v. Attorney General, 523 F.3d 387, 402-05 (3d Cir.2008) (Stapleton, J., dissenting). The Supreme Court affirmed in Nijhawan without mentioning “divisibility.” The Justices explained the categorical approach this way:
We also noted [in James v. United States, 550 U.S. 192, 127 S.Ct. 1586, 167 L.Ed.2d 532 (2007)] that the categorical method is not always easy to apply. That is because sometimes a separately numbered subsection of a criminal statute will refer to several different crimes, each described separately. And it can happen that some of these crimes involve violence while others do not. A single Massachusetts statute section entitled “Breaking and Entering at Night,” for example, criminalizes breaking into a “building, ship, vessel or vehicle.” Mass. Gen. Laws, ch. 266, § 16 (West 2006). In such an instance, we have said, a court must determine whether an offender’s prior conviction was for the violent, rather than the nonviolent, break-ins that this single five-word phrase describes (e.g., breaking into a building rather than into a vessel), by examining “the indictment or information and jury instructions,” Taylor, supra, at 602, 110 S.Ct. 2143, or, if a guilty plea is at issue, by examining the plea agreement, plea colloquy or “some comparable judicial record” of the factual basis for the plea. Shepard v. United States, 544 U.S. 13, 26, 125 S.Ct. 1254, 161 L.Ed.2d 205 (2005).
129 S.Ct. at 2299. If a judge may look at the charging papers and plea colloquy to ascertain whether the defendant burgled a house or a vessel, even though a single subsection covers both, what role can “divisibility” play? Surely not that there must be a list (as there was in the Massachusetts law quoted in Nijhawan); recall that Taylor dealt with statutes that did not have lists and made it a crime to break into any building with intent to commit a felony inside. Nijhawan shows that Taylor has not been modified by later decisions.
Woods dropped a five-week-old baby on his head, then shook the comatose child to death. That is purposeful, violent, and aggressive conduct. The possibility that Woods did not intend to drop the child need not detain us; the state statute requires some knowing conduct, a standard satisfied by the shaking if not the dropping. (The state judge did not pin this down, because it was not relevant as a matter of state law.) The Woods panel concludes that recklessness does not meet Begay’s requirement of intentional conduct, but Farmer holds that criminal recklessness — the kind involved here — is a form of intent, and I think it likely that the Justices will deem it sufficient for recidivism enhancements too.
Recklessness in criminal law means creating a risk of serious harm, usually by knowingly doing dangerous things with eyes closed to consequences. See generally Model Penal Code § 220.2(2). That mental state has been equated with intent not only in eighth-amendment cases but also in securities law, where proof of fraud depends on showing intent to deceive. Ernst & Ernst v. Hochfelder, 425 U.S. 185, 96 S.Ct. 1375, 47 L.Ed.2d 668 (1976). We held in Sundstrand Corp. v. Sun Chemical Corp., 553 F.2d 1033, 1044-45 (7th Cir.1977), that recklessness equates to intent when danger is so obvious that a reasonable person must be aware of it. Every other court of appeals has concluded that *417recklessness (appropriately defined) is a form of intent, and, though the question remains open in the Supreme Court, the Justices have not suggested restiveness. See Tellabs, Inc. v. Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd., 551 U.S. 308, 319 n. 3, 127 S.Ct. 2499, 168 L.Ed.2d 179 (2007). Why, then, should we declare that for recidivist enhancements a reckless indifference to the danger caused by one’s deliberate acts cannot satisfy the Begay standard?
The Woods panel writes: “nothing we say here is meant to suggest that the presence of any recklessness component in a crime means that the conviction cannot be one of violence.” Op. 409 (emphasis in original). The opinion then gives an elaborate example involving spiked punch and a purpose to commit mayhem. “Purpose” is the most exacting standard of intent under the Model Penal Code’s typology, it suffices by any standard. I grant that recklessness is not universally equivalent to intent; statutory context matters. But in the main a violent or aggressive crime that produces injury or death should meet the Begay standard, even if the actor recklessly ignored the risks to others.
Take a person who draws a gun and fires six shots into a crowded night club, not caring whether anyone is injured or killed. The intentional discharge of a gun is a violent and aggressive act; that the shooter is indifferent to the consequences shows his danger and is a good reason for a recidivist enhancement following his next conviction; it is not a reason to ignore the conduct. Likewise a person who drops a baby on his head, and intentionally shakes the inert body violently, has committed an aggressive and dangerous act; the person’s indifference to consequences should not prevent counting the conviction. I disagree with the approach of Woods to the extent that it commits this circuit to a contrary course.
One final observation. Taylor, Shepard, James, Chambers, and Nijhawan all involve the interpretation of statutes. This appeal involves the interpretation and application of the Sentencing Guidelines. We have held that the career-offender enhancement must be treated as a statute to the extent it implements 28 U.S.C. § 994(h), which requires the sentences for recidivists who commit specified crimes to be “at or near the maximum term authorized” for the new federal crimes. And this means, as we have also held, that the language in § 4B1.2 should be understood the same way as the language in § 16(b) and § 924(e), to the extent that the Guideline and the statutes use the same words. But Guideline 4B1.2 goes beyond § 994(h) by including federal offenses for which Congress has not specified a sentence “at or near the maximum” for recidivists. For these other offenders, the Guideline is merely advisory, and district judges may disagree. See United States v. Knox, 573 F.3d 441, 447-50 (7th Cir. July 20, 2009).
Moreover, a conclusion that a particular prior conviction is not one for a “crime of violence” does not limit the judge’s discretion to give a higher sentence based on the defendant’s actual criminal history. See Spears v. United States, - U.S. -, 129 S.Ct. 840, 172 L.Ed.2d 596 (2009); Kimbrough v. United States, 552 U.S. 85, 128 S.Ct. 558, 169 L.Ed.2d 481 (2007). The career-offender guideline does not affect the maximum allowable sentence. Since “[n]o limitation shall be placed on the information concerning the background, character, and conduct of a person convicted of an offense which a court of the United States may receive and consider for the purpose of imposing an appropriate sentence” (18 U.S.C. § 3661), a district judge is entitled to ask what Woods actually did.
*418Neither the categorical approach of Taylor nor the divisibility approach of Woods prevents the judge from giving Woods the same sentence that would be appropriate if involuntary manslaughter in Illinois were a “crime of violence” under § 4B1.2(a)(2). Woods just requires a more roundabout approach at sentencing. Is that sensible? When a recidivism enhancement raises the statutory floor under a sentence, or the maximum allowable sentence, a court should be punctilious about ensuring that the enhancement applies. But when the prior conviction just affects an exercise of discretion, the approach should be more flexible: when selection of the sentence is not governed by rule, why employ elaborate rules about “divisibility” and “recklessness” that the district judge may elect to bypass in the end?