Court Opinion

ID: 9469557
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:43:55.98369+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:27.250025
License: Public Domain

ALDON J. ANDERSON, District Judge,
concurring:
As I read the Court’s opinion, two alternative reasons are given to support affirmance of the district court. First, the Court assumes that double jeopardy is theoretically applicable to the New Mexico habitual criminal proceeding, and holds that it nonetheless does not operate to bar the resentencing here because the prosecution’s omission at the first sentencing hearing was more akin to “trial error” than a failure to produce sufficient evidence, as those concepts are distinguished in Burks v. United States, 437 U.S. 1, 15-16, 98 S.Ct. 2141, 2149, 57 L.Ed.2d 1 (1978). Second, the Court rejects outright the proposition that double jeopardy has application to the New Mexico proceeding.
I agree with the Court, for reasons stated hereafter, that the prosecution’s failure at the first sentencing hearing to produce evidence of the sequence of defendant’s prior convictions should not bar it from retrying the defendant. Therefore I concur in the result reached by the Court. I respectfully differ with the Court’s view expressed in the second part of its opinion, however, that double jeopardy is inapplicable to this type of sentencing proceeding because in my view this case is controlled by the Supreme Court’s recent holding in Bullington v. Missouri, 451 U.S. 430, 101 S.Ct. 1852, 68 L.Ed.2d 270 (1981), not United States v. DiFrancesco, 449 U.S. 117, 101 S.Ct. 426, 66 L.Ed.2d 328 (1980), as stated by the majority. Consequently I am unable to join in this portion of the majority’s opinion.
I appreciate the impetus for the majority’s desire to distinguish the habitual criminal proceeding at issue here from the bifurcated sentencing proceeding before the Supreme Court in Bullington. As the majority notes, until Bullington, double jeopardy protection had not been applied to sentencing. See United States v. DiFrancesco, 449 U.S. 117, 132-38, 101 S.Ct. 426, 434-38, 66 L.Ed.2d 328 (1980); North Carolina v. Pearce, 395 U.S. 711, 719-21, 89 S.Ct. 2072, 2077-78, 23 L.Ed.2d 656 (1969). By applying double jeopardy to the sentencing procedure in Bullington the Supreme Court breaks new ground, creating the risk that in the future double jeopardy may be applied in other sentencing contexts to give sentences a finality that, for good reasons, the law has not previously accorded them.
The majority opinion suggests at least three reasons why the Bullington holding should not be extended to the facts of this case. First, the majority states that an habitual offender sentencing, where the jury must resolve only the issue of the *377defendant’s identity, is more of a “formality” in terms of the proof required than a death sentence proceeding, where the jury must make a subjective determination whether the requisite aggravating circumstances are present. Second, the majority argues that the Supreme Court was undoubtedly concerned with the severity of the death sentence, which is different in kind than any other sentence. Thus, an “acquittal” of the death sentence should prevent a later sentence that might result in the death penalty. This concern is not present here, and in the majority’s view serves to take this ease out of the Buffing-ton rule. Finally it is said that in the bifurcated proceeding in Buffington the same proof that is offered on the issue of guilt or innocence is also relevant on the issue of punishment, so that the two are “wedded” for double jeopardy purposes. This is unlike the proceeding here, where the evidence of defendant’s guilt adduced at the trial triggering the holding of the habitual criminal proceeding is irrelevant to the narrow issue presented at that proceeding — whether the convicted defendant is the same individual that committed previous crimes.
The analysis made indicates certain factual differences between this case and Bull-in gton which, in the majority view, limit the reach of Buffington and require that its rule not be extended to this case. However, these distinguishing factors, of necessity critical to the majority’s conclusion, are not relied on nor even articulated by the Supreme Court as a basis for its holding. Reliance on them to distinguish Buffington would therefore seem to be misplaced.
The Supreme Court in Buffington makes it clear that the critical feature of the Missouri sentencing procedure impelling the extension of double jeopardy protection to it is that it has all the earmarks of a trial at which the government must prove its case. The Supreme Court states the basis for its holding as follows:
The procedure that resulted in the imposition of the sentence of life imprisonment upon petitioner Bullington at his first trial, however, differs significantly from those employed in any of the Court’s cases where the Double Jeopardy Clause has been held inapplicable to sentencing. The jury in this case was not given unbounded discretion to select an appropriate punishment from a wide range authorized by statute. Rather, a separate hearing was required and was held, and the jury was presented both a choice between two alternatives and standards to guide the making of that choice. Nor did the prosecution simply recommend what it felt to be an appropriate punishment. It undertook the burden of establishing certain facts beyond a reasonable doubt in its quest to obtain the harsher of two alternative verdicts. The presentence hearing resembled and, indeed, in all relevant respects was like the immediately preceding trial on the issue of guilt or innocence. It was itself a trial on the issue of punishment so precisely defined by the Missouri statutes.
451 U.S. at 438, 101 S.Ct. at 1858 (Emphasis added). The Court further states its rationale: “Missouri explicitly requires the jury to determine whether the prosecution has ‘proved its case.’ ” Id. at 444, 101 S.Ct. at 1861 (Emphasis in original). Thus, the Supreme Court’s rationale is that where a sentencing proceeding is like a trial on the merits, at which the prosecution must present evidence of specific issues and a factfinder must then determine whether the prosecution has met its burden, double jeopardy bars a second try if the prosecution fails.
All these requirements are present in the New Mexico habitual criminal proceeding. It is conducted, as the majority notes in its opinion, just like a trial. The defendant is entitled to counsel, to be present, and to have the issues tried to a jury. The prosecution has a specific burden to meet, and the jury must determine whether this burden has in fact been met. The proceeding is indeed a “trial on the issue of punishment.”
True, the issues to be tried may be characterized as more “formal” and the penalty *378that may be imposed is not as severe as in Bullington. Also, the key issue here, the defendant’s identity, is not “wedded” to the issue of defendant’s guilt that was resolved at the preceding trial on the merits. Nevertheless, the rationale expressed in Bullington — that the trial-type nature of the proceeding there requires the application of double jeopardy — is broad enough that its logic should extend to the sentencing procedure at issue here.
The majority, as authority for its contrary conclusion, relies principally on the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. DiFrancesco, 449 U.S. 117, 101 S.Ct. 426, 66 L.Ed.2d 328 (1980). In DiFrancesco, the Supreme Court considered a double jeopardy challenge to the “dangerous special offender” provision of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, 18 U.S.C. §§ 3575 and 3576. This statute, which permits the Government to appeal to the United States Court of Appeals the sentence imposed by the District Court on one adjudged a “dangerous special offender,” was held not to violate double jeopardy.
Bullington was decided less than half a year after DiFrancesco. The Supreme Court’s discussion in Bullington of DiFrancesco plainly indicates that the case before this Court falls within the Bullington, not the DiFrancesco, rule, as stated by the majority. The Supreme Court sets out three primary factors that distinguish the two cases:
[Tjhere are highly pertinent differences between the Missouri procedures controlling the present case and those found constitutional in DiFrancesco. The federal procedures at issue in DiFrancesco include appellate review of a sentence “on the record of the sentencing court,” § 3576, not a de novo proceeding that gives the Government the opportunity to convince a second factfinder of its view of the facts. Moreover, the choice presented to the federal judge under § 3575 is far broader than that faced by the state jury at the present petitioner’s trial. Bullington’s Missouri jury was given — and under the State’s statutes could be given — only two choices, death or life imprisonment. On the other hand, if the Federal Government proves that a person convicted of a felony is a dangerous special offender, the judge may sentence that person to “an appropriate term not to exceed twenty-five years and not disproportionate in severity to the maximum term otherwise ■ authorized by law for such felony.” § 3575(b). Finally, although the statute requires the Government to prove the additional fact that the defendant is a “dangerous special offender,” it need do so only by a preponderance of the evidence. Ibid. This stands in contrast to the reasonable-doubt standard of the Missouri statute, the same standard required to be used at the trial on the issue of guilt or innocence.
451 U.S. at 440-41, 101 S.Ct. at 1859.
Applying the above analysis to this case, all the factors referred to by the Supreme Court to distinguish Bullington from DiFrancesco indicate that we should follow Bullington. In this case, to permit the State of New Mexico to reprosecute the defendant affords it “the opportunity to convince a second factfinder of its view of the facts,” id., just as in Bullington. The Supreme Court indicates that this is significantly different than the “appellate review of a sentence,” id., that was at issue in DiFrancesco. Furthermore, in this case, as in Bullington, the jury decides only the narrow issue presented to it. Under the New Mexico procedure, the jury is called on to decide whether the prosecution has met its burden, and accordingly determines whether the defendant has been proved an habitual offender. The jury does not have the wide sentencing discretion of a district judge under 18 U.S.C. § 3575 that the Supreme Court stated was critical in DiFrancesco. Finally, though there is apparently some doubt on this question, “(t)he majority rule,” as the majority notes, “appears to require that proof under the habitual offender statute be established beyond a reasonable doubt.” Majority opinion at 372. This is the same burden that must be met in Bullington’s bifurcated sentencing proceeding, and significantly, the Supreme Court *379found, a greater burden than the preponderance of the evidence standard the United States must meet to prove “dangerous special offender” status under the statute that was at issue in DiFrancesco. In short, all of the critical factors that, according to the Supreme Court, serve to distinguish DiFrancesco from Bullington dictate compellingly that the Bullington rule controls the case at bar. This view has recently been adopted by the Fifth Circuit in a case on all fours with this one. Bullard v. Estelle, 665 F.2d 1347 (5th Cir. 1982).
Nonetheless, the result reached by the majority is acceptable because under Burks the retrial of criminal charges is barred only where the prosecution has had “one fair opportunity to offer whatever proof it could assemble.” 437 U.S. at 16, 98 S.Ct. at 2150. Here the prosecution did not have a fair opportunity to put on its evidence, because until the New Mexico Supreme Court issued its opinion remanding defendant’s case the prosecution simply did not know that proof of the commission and conviction of each offense before the commission and conviction of the next would be required. Certainly this failure of proof should not bar a retrial, under Burks. Indeed, it might be fair to state as a general principle that whenever a conviction is reversed solely for failure to produce evidence that was not theretofore generally understood to be essential to prove the crime, that double jeopardy does not bar reprosecution. Because this rationale is stated as an alternative basis for the Court’s decision, I concur in this portion of it, and the ultimate decision reached.