Court Opinion

ID: 9498584
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:21:28.188453+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:55.273409
License: Public Domain

KLEINFELD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent.
The majority decides this case contrary to binding circuit authority, and contrary to the views of all nine other circuits that have spoken to the question. Fortunately, the practical significance of the majority’s holding should gradually dissipate as preBooker1 sentences complete their passage through appellate and post-conviction re*1097view. Unfortunately, there are plenty of pre-Booker sentences left to go.
The district judge’s duty to advise a defendant of “any mandatory minimum penalty”2 has always been understood to mean statutory mandatory mínimums, not guideline “mandatory” mínimums. What everyone (judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys) interpreting criminal law knew, until today’s opinion, was that “mandatory mínimums” meant such penalties as the five-year, statutory mandatory minimum sentence — with no possibility of probation, parole, or of serving it concurrently with any other term — for using a gun during a crime of violence or a drug trafficking crime.3 There is no discretion, no exception, and no flexibility to depart from this sort of statutory, mandatory minimum.
There is now no such thing as a “mandatory minimum” sentence imposed by the guidelines because, under Booker, the guidelines are merely advisory. But even before Booker, there was no such thing; the guidelines always allowed for departures and Rule 11 provided for plea agreements binding the court to a guideline determination.4 As for the minimum fine provisions central to this case, they were never mandatory by their own terms because they were conditional on the court’s determination of the defendant’s ability to pay.5
Rule 11, upon which the majority relies, plainly distinguishes between the subsection (I) duty to advise of mandatory minimum sentences and the quite distinct subsection (M) duty to advise the defendant of “the court’s obligation to apply the Sentencing Guidelines, and the court’s discretion to depart from those guidelines under some circumstances.”6 Post-Booker, that advice will be even more distinct from subsection (I) mandatory minimum advice than it used to be. The addition of subsection (M) at a time when subsection (I) was already there shows that the rule was never meant to apply subsection (I) to the guidelines. When subsection (M) was added by amendments in 1989, the Advisory Committee Notes explained that the purpose was to assure that the defendant knew of “the existence of the guidelines,” even though “it would be impractical, if not impossible, to know which guidelines will be relevant prior to the formulation of a pre-sentence report.”7 As for the subsection (I) duty to advise the defendant of mandatory minimum sentences, the Advisory Committee Notes explained that the statutory mandatory minimum, unlike other consequences of the plea of which it was not necessary to advise the defendant, “is usually readily ascertainable from the face of the statute defining the crime, and thus it is feasible for the judge to know specifically what to tell the defendant.”8
In this case, it would have been likewise impossible for the district judge to know that there would really be a “mandatory” fine when he accepted Adams’s guilty plea.9 Most criminals are not multi-mil*1098lionaires like Adams. It is therefore likely the exception rather than the rule that the fine specified by the guidelines was imposed — even pr e-Booker — because the judge would find that the defendant could not pay the fine. Perhaps Adams could have anticipated that the district judge would have imposed a fine because Adams knew his own wealth, but the judge accepting the plea could not have known and likely would not have imagined that he was sentencing a man worth more than $7 million. District judges do not get a lot of defendants who can actually pay six figure fines. The presentence report, which in this case showed that the defendant was a multi-millionaire, is not prepared until after the judge takes the plea.10
Careful trial judges in all courts generally use scripts that they or judicial service agencies have prepared to assure that they do not leave out anything they are required to say. This is especially true in what are, for the district judges, routine and high volume proceedings in which one can easily forget some detail. Federal district judges have the advantage of particularly good scripts, prepared by the Federal Judicial Center. The Federal Judicial Center script for taking pleas, used in innumerable Ninth Circuit pleas with such modifications as our case law has required, draws the same distinction with reference to statutory mandatory minimums involving firearms and drugs:
(b) Determine whether defendant faces a mandatory minimum sentence or an increase in the statutory maximum sentence because of one or more prior firearms offenses, violent felonies, or drug offenses. If this is not known at the time of the plea, advise defendant of the possible maximum sentence.
Regarding the sentencing guidelines, the script takes the only practical approach, “I don’t know, it’s unpredictable. Talk to your lawyer.”:
L. Ask defendant:
1. Have you and your attorney talked about how the sentencing guidelines might apply to your case? [Note: If there is a plea agreement that a specific sentence will be imposed (Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(e)(1)(C)), skip to question 4.].
2. Do you understand that the court will not be able to determine the guideline sentence for your case until after the presentence report has been completed and you and the government have had an opportunity to challenge the reported facts and the application of the guidelines recommended by the probation officer, and that the sentence imposed may be different from any estimate your attorney may have given you?
3. Do you also understand that, after your guideline range has been determined, the court has the authority in some circumstances to depart from the guidelines and impose a sentence that is more severe or less severe than the sentence called for by the guidelines?
As the majority notes, we held in United States v. Maree11 that Rule 11
requires the sentencing court to ‘inform the defendant of ... the mandatory minimum penalty provided by law.’ The Rule does not, however, require the court to discuss the minimum guideline sentence. In a practical sense, it would be impossible for a court to inform a defendant of the minimum sentence available under the Guidelines. The presentence report, which is not prepared prior to the entrance of a guilty *1099plea, is essential to the court’s formulation of the relevant sentence factors.
The majority leaves out the next sentence from Maree, which expressly answers the question before us: “Rule 11 only requires the mention of a minimum sentence, not the minimum guideline sentence.”12 Today we hold the opposite. This failure to follow our own precedent is impermissible without rehearing en banc.
The majority tries to avoid Maree — going the “wrong” way from its point of view — by suggesting that Maree is no longer good law because Rule 11 was amended to add subsection (M). That argument is mistaken, and we must follow Maree as binding circuit authority. Subsection (I) says to tell the defendant of “any mandatory minimum penalty,”13 but subsection (M) says to tell the defendant of “the court’s obligation to apply the Sentencing Guidelines, and the court’s discretion to depart.”14 The language is clear enough in distinguishing that the defendant must be told (1) what the statutory, mandatory mínimums are, and (2) that the guidelines exist and must be applied subject to the court’s discretion to depart. The Advisory Committee Notes make it even more explicit that mandatory mínimums “readily ascertainable from the face of the statute defining the crime,”15 but that the court need not tell the defendant “which guidelines will be important.”16 That is about as plain as these things get: by adding subsection (M), the Rule did not add a duty to advise what guideline mínimums would apply because, as the Advisory Committee Notes explain, that would be “impracticable, if not impossible.”
And that is what Maree says, the controlling Ninth Circuit case the majority prefers not to follow. Maree disposed of two Rule 11 issues. First, the court had not told the defendant that it was obligated to follow the guidelines, subject to discretionary departures.17 On that issue, the addition of Rule ll(b)(l)(M) controlled, and that confuses the majority’s reading. Maree held that the judge was not then required to advise the defendant that the guidelines were controlling because subsection (M) had not yet gone into effect.18 Second, Maree complained that the judge had not told him what minimum sentence the guidelines required. Maree does not tie its analysis of this second argument to subsection (M) at all, though today’s majority is confused on this point. Maree quotes the requirement in (I) — binding then and now — to advise the defendant of any “mandatory minimum penalty,” and holds that (I) “only requires the mention of a minimum sentence, not the minimum guideline sentence.”19 In what has *1100turned out to be a vain hope of avoiding confusion, Maree stressed the distinction between minimum sentences and minimum guideline sentences, holding that the “minimum sentence referred to in the rule refers to the statutory minimum.”20
Evidently, only today’s majority is confused about the significance of adding subsection (M). The nine other circuits that have ruled on this issue unanimously hold that the subsection (I) requirement that the judge tell the defendant of any mandatory minimum means only statutory mandatory mínimums, not guideline mandatory mínimums.21 And these nine other circuits have so ruled before and after the addition of subsection (M), the intervening event the majority uses to upend Maree. They run from 1989 to 2003, a solid phalanx of authority agreeing with what we held in Maree, which binds us today. In United States v. Littlejohn22 — subsequent to the addition of (M) to Rule 11 — we ourselves cited Maree for the proposition that the “district court need not advise defendant of a minimum sentence required under the guidelines.”23
The majority tries to distinguish Maree by implying that the court here knew that Adams would be subject to a mandatory minimum fine, but that is incorrect. As explained above, the fine was not mandatory and the court could not have known of Adams’s net worth until the pre-sentence report computed it. There is simply no way to escape Maree’s holding that the “minimum sentence referred to in the rule refers to the statutory minimum.”24 The majority’s reliance on Littlejohn is also unavailing: that case involved failure to warn a defendant of the statutory consequences of a guilty plea, not guideline penalties.25
*1101Let us hypothesize that a normal, intelligent, scholarly, careful district judge trying to follow the law is called upon to decide whether he had to advise the defendant in the Rule 11 colloquy of a minimum prescribed by the sentencing guidelines. Let us further hypothesize that the judge thought he might be able to figure out some way to calculate the defendant’s criminal history level and guidelines adjustments at the time of the plea. Gathering our authorities, the judge would read in Maree that “Rule 11 only requires the mention of a minimum sentence, not the minimum guideline sentence.”26 Then the judge would read in Littlejohn that Maree held that the “district court need not advise defendant of a minimum sentence under the guidelines.”27 If the judge had any question about whether the law was settled, he might read the opinions of other circuits and learn that all nine that had spoken had at all times come to the same conclusion. Asked “Does Rule 11 require a judge to advise a defendant of a minimum guideline sentence?” our hypothetical perfect judge would say “no, unequivocally no. That is too easy a question to ask seriously in the face of all this authority.” That sensible judge, seasoned by the prudence that accompanies experience, would think, “if I tell the defendant what I think the guidelines range is for his sentence, then I risk reversal because some of what affects that range is likely to be a surprise we all learn from the pre-sentence report.” 28 Given our previous, clear authority on this subject, today’s holding to the contrary will be quite a surprise.
Nor can I share the majority’s insouciance in the face of the nine opinions of our sister circuits expressly rejecting the majority’s position. As outlined in footnote 21, infra, each of these circuits has concluded that Rule 11 is concerned solely with statutory minimum penalties, not mínimums imposed by the sentencing guidelines. For example, the Eleventh Circuit, quoting our decision in Maree, held “[w]e agree with the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning.... ‘Rule 11 only requires the mention of a minimum sentence, not the minimum guideline sentence. The minimum sentence referred to in the rule refers to the statutory minimum.’ ”29 When Justice Ginsburg was on the D.C. Circuit, she authored an opinion coming to the same conclusion. She explained that “the statutory prescriptions ... are the ones to which Rule 11[ ] points in referring to ‘the mandatory minimum penalty provided by law.”30 The guilty plea was reversed on other grounds,31 but the'majority was clear that it was joining the “uniformly held” views of the other circuits.32 The Seventh Circuit has also recently rejected the majority’s position in clear and unmistakable *1102terms, explaining that “Rule 11 only requires that the court inform the defendant of the maximum and minimum penalties authorized under the applicable statute.”33 Despite nine of our sister circuits having agreed with us, we have now disagreed with ourselves.

. United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 125 S.Ct. 738, 160 L.Ed.2d 621 (2005).

. Fed. R. Crim P. 1 l(b)(l)(I).

. 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1).

. Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(c)(1)(C).

. U.S.S.G. § 5E1.2 (e), (f).

. Fed.R.Crim.P. ll(b)(l)(M).

. Fed.R.Crim.P. 11 (Advisory Committee Note: 1989 Amendments).

. Fed.R.Crim.P. 11 (Advisory Committee Note: 1974 Amendments).

. Adams does not raise as an issue on appeal any failure by the government to make recommendations as promised. He acknowledged in his plea agreement that the court would not be bound by government regulations. The court could have departed from the guidelines and accepted the government's recommendation if there was an appropriate justification for doing so.

. United States v. Sanders, 41 F.3d 480, 487 (9th Cir.1994) ("[T]he presentence report is not prepared until after the defendant pleads guilty.”).

. United States v. Maree, 934 F.2d 196, 200 (9th Cir.1991).

. Id. at 200. (emphasis in original).

. Fed.R.Crim.P. ll(b)(l)(I).

. Fed.R.Crim.P. ll(b)(l)(M).

. Fed.R.Crim.P. 11 (Advisory Committee Note: 1974 Amendments).

. Fed.R.Crim.P. 11 (Advisory Committee Note: 1989 Amendments) (“This requirement assures that the existence of guidelines will be known to a defendant before a plea of guilty or nolo contendere is accepted. Since it will be impracticable, if not impossible, to know which guidelines will be relevant prior to the formulation of a presentence report and resolution of disputed facts, the amendment does not require the court to specify which guidelines will be important ... By giving the advice, the court places the defendant and defense counsel on notice of the importance that guidelines may play in sentencing and of the possibility of a departure from those guidelines. A defendant represented by competent counsel will be in a position to enter an intelligent plea.”).

. Maree, 934 F.2d at 200 ("Maree first contends that the district court was required to advise him that it was obligated to consider the applicable sentencing guidelines.”).

. Id.

. Id. at 200 (emphasis in original).

. Id.

. See, e.g., United States v. Watley, 987 F.2d 841, 846 (D.C.Cir.1993) (Noting that Rule 11 refers to "statutory prescriptions”); see also United States v. Mosley, 173 F.3d 1318, 1327 & n. 11 (11th Cir.1999); United States v. Rhodes, 913 F.2d 839, 843-44 (10th Cir.1990) ("Rule 11 is satisfied when a court informs the defendant of the maximum and minimum statutory sentences.”); United States v. Thomas, 894 F.2d 996, 996 (8th Cir.1990) ("The District Court complied with the requirements of Rule 11(c)(1) by advising Thomas of the maximum statutory penalty for his offenses.”); U.S. v. Blalock, 321 F.3d 686, 689 (7th Cir.2003) ("Rule 11 only requires that the court inform the defendant of the maximum and minimum penalties authorized under the applicable statute, as well as the fact that the particular sentence imposed will be determined by reference to the federal sentencing guidelines”); United States v. Pearson, 910 F.2d 221, 223 (5th Cir.1990) (Explaining that Rule 1 l's "notice of mandatory minimum and maximum sentences has been construed to apply to statutory sentencing ranges, and not to guideline adjustments.”); United States v. DeFusco, 949 F.2d 114, 118 (4th Cir.1991) ("The guideline range does not set a mandatory minimum penalty for an offense within the meaning of Rule 11.”); United States v. Henry, 893 F.2d 46, 47 (3rd Cir.1990) (Explaining that Rule 11 "is concerned with statutory minimum and maximum penalties and not with guidelines ranges.”); United States v. Fernandez, 877 F.2d 1138, 1143 (2nd Cir. 1989) ("it was enough that the district court herein informed appellant of the minimum and maximum sentences which he faced— Rule 11 required no more. The statutory minimum and maximum sentences for the offense of conviction mark the boundaries within which the Guidelines sentence must fall.”).

. United States v. Littlejohn, 224 F.3d 960, 967-68 (9th Cir.2000).

. Id. at 967.

. Maree, 934 F.2d at 200.

. See Littlejohn, 224 F.3d at 966 ("The direct/collateral analysis in Littlejohn's case must focus on two separate statutory provisions: 21 U.S.C. § 862(a) ... and 21 U.S.C. § 862a.").

. Maree, 934 F.2d at 200 (emphasis in original).

. Littlejohn, 224 F.3d at 967.

. See, e.g., Watley, 987 F.2d at 842, 847 (Court’s incorrect estimate that it “could, and likely would set [defendant’s] sentence” at one range when the guidelines required another sufficient to withdraw guilty plea); see also United States v. DeFusco, 949 F.2d 114, 118 (4th Cir.1991) (quoting United States v. Henry, 893 F.2d 46, 48-49 (3rd Cir. 1990)) (”[A]ny estimate of the guideline range that the district court would give in advance of the pre-sentence report might well turn out to be misleading and could be the basis for a contention that the guilty plea should be invalidated.”).

. United States v. Blalock, 321 F.3d 686, 689 (7th Cir.2003).

. United States v. Mosley, 173 F.3d 1318, 1327 n. 11 (11th Cir.1999) (quoting Maree, 934 F.2d at 200).

. United States v. Watley, 987 F.2d at 846.

. Id. at 847 (Explaining that the reversal "did not stem from a failure to adhere to Rule 1 l[]’s penalty notice instruction.”).

. Id. at 846.