Court Opinion

ID: 9480679
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:55:10.456825+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:50.168556
License: Public Domain

RYAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring separately.
While I concur fully in the court’s disposition of the issues presented in this appeal *1346and in the analysis employed in part II of my brother’s opinion, I do not, as to the sentencing guideline issue, subscribe to the analysis set forth in United States v. Joan, 883 F.2d 491 (6th Cir.1989).1
Joan adopted an unnecessarily complex and insufficiently deferential analysis for the review of sentencing guidelines issues. It requires the appellate court, when reviewing sentencing guidelines appeals, to apply three separate standards of review in the same case: de novo, clearly erroneous, and reasonableness.
Under Joan, step one (whether the case is sufficiently “unusual” to warrant a departure), whatever that means, calls for de novo review; step two (whether the circumstances that would warrant a departure “actually exist”) requires review under a clearly erroneous standard; and, step three (whether the departure made is “reasonable”) is “a judgment call.” 883 F.2d at 494, citing United States v. Diaz-Villafane, 874 F.2d 43, 49 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 177, 107 L.Ed.2d 133 (1989).
The three-step analysis in Joan apparently was first conceived by a panel of the First Circuit in United States v. Diaz-Villafane, 874 F.2d at 49, and was expressly adopted in Joan as being “a highly intelligent, thoughtful exposition of the basis for departure” in sentence guideline cases. 883 F.2d at 494.2 While it indeed may be that, it is not, in my judgment, a practical, legally sound, or sufficiently deferential analysis for reviewing trial court sentencing decisions.
I.
It is too late in the day to question, at least at this appellate level, the wisdom of Congress’ broad policy judgment that so-called disparity in sentencing is an evil to be eliminated in the federal criminal justice system. Whether anything was “broke” and, if “broke,” whether the sentencing guidelines fixed it, are questions now beyond this court’s competence.
The United States Sentencing Commission’s response to Congress’ mandate to eliminate sentence disparity is, of course, the sentencing guidelines. Undoubtedly, the commission’s attempt to anticipate every nuance of criminal conduct for every crime named in the United States Code and elsewhere and to quantify every shade of criminal culpability has brought greater uniformity to criminal sentencing in the federal courts. Whether the complex matrix of presumptions, rules, regulations, and arithmetical formulae that comprise the sentencing guidelines have enhanced or diminished substantial justice in federal court sentencing is another matter.
In carrying out Congress’ command to eliminate much of the disparity in federal court sentencing, the sentencing commission appreciated, wisely, that there is disparity and there is disparity: some sentence disparity is unreasonable, some, perhaps most, is not. Fortunately, the sentencing commission recognized what every experienced trial judge has always known: sentencing is an art, not a science. In recognition, the commission adopted an elaborate scheme to enable sentencing judges to depart from the rigid sentencing guidelines formulae when justice requires. See United States Sentencing Commission’s Sentencing Guideline Manual, §§ 5K1.1-5K2.15 at 5.41-5.47 (rev. ed. 1989). Whether the departure is upward or downward from the legislated sentencing range and whether dictated by the addition or subtraction of points to establish an individualized total offense level, the departure decision is inherently discretionary. *1347See United States v. Hays, 899 F.2d 515, 519 (6th Cir.1990); Joan, 883 F.2d at 496 (quoting Diaz-Villafane, 874 F.2d at 52); United States v. Rodriguez, 882 F.2d 1059, 1066 (6th Cir.1989), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 1144, 107 L.Ed.2d 1048 (1990); United States v. Allen, 873 F.2d 963, 966 (6th Cir.1989). Although it involves certain arithmetic calculations and, as with all discretionary judicial decisions, requires some preliminary fact-finding, in the last analysis sentencing guidelines departure decisions are essentially discretionary judgments incorporating a host of relevant variables that enable the sentencing judge to settle upon a sentence that responds more to the demands of individual justice than to the abstract congressional policy of sentence uniformity. The departure authority granted to sentencing judges is the individualized justice component that enables judges to tailor the sentence to a particular defendant for a particular crime, taking into account the unique factors relevant to each. That is the art of just sentencing.
Just as such sentencing presumes a substantial amount of discretion in the sentencing court, if it is to work it requires a substantial amount of deference to that discretion on appellate review. But Joan, with its three-prong, three-standards-of-review-in-one methodology borrowed from Diaz-Villafane, makes no mention at all of an abuse of discretion standard of review at all and, instead, mandates a division of the sentencing judgment into three parts with a different standard of appellate review for each.
The sentencing decision has, to be sure, a number of components: statutes, guidelines requirements, judicial experience, the trial court’s sense of justice, and the countless unquantifiable nuances of victim, defendant, and community interests. But, as with any complex decision-making process having numerous components, the sentencing decision is a unitary, heavily discretionary judgment call. The Joan sentence review formula artificially fragments that unitary judgment call into three discrete components each having a different standard of review, it ignores the real elements of trial court sentencing, and it minimizes the significance of the discretionary component.
II.
Of the ever-increasing volume of sentencing appeals to this court, the vast majority are cases in which the accused or the government complains of the sentencing court’s decision relating to upward or downward departures from the agreed sentence range, or of the addition or subtraction of “points” from the base offense level. Both kinds of sentencing decisions are being referred to as “departures.” In the vast majority of these appeals, the departure decisions, while always rooted in the statute creating the sentencing guidelines and the guidelines themselves, involve judgment calls: discretionary decisions. By superimposing over the trial court’s essentially discretionary judgment a fragmented, three-part review formula that calls for application of three different standards of review in every appeal, there is created a convoluted intellectual exercise that is an open invitation to appellate courts to substitute their sentencing judgment for the trial court’s. Appellate judges who would have sentenced the accused differently than the trial court did will have no trouble finding a way to do so when the lower court’s sentencing decision is reviewed partly de novo, partly on a clearly erroneous standard, and partly on a determination whether the trial court’s “judgment call” was “reasonable.”
III.
There is a simpler, fairer, and, to me, more sensible approach to the appellate court’s statutory responsibility to review sentencing guidelines cases. That approach would require the appellate court to determine the standard of review in each case by first determining the precise sentencing issue presented on appeal. If the claim on appeal is that the sentencing court did not observe the requirements of Title II of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, known as the Sentencing Reform Act *1348of 1984, Pub.L. No. 98-473, 98 Stat.1987, 18 U.S.C. § 3551, et seq., or the sentence guidelines regulations, the standard of review would be de novo. However, if the essence of the appeal, stripped of its appellate rhetoric, is that the district court lawfully departed from the guidelines by considering matters not taken into account in the sentence guidelines regulations but departed to an extent thought by the appellant to be too harsh or too lenient, the review would be for abuse of discretion.
Occasionally a sentencing guidelines appeal will present an issue, properly framed, of whether the district court made findings of fact in the sentencing process that are not supported by the evidence. In such rare instances, a clearly erroneous standard of review would, of course, apply.
Experience, as well as common sense, suggests that it will be an extremely rare sentencing guidelines appeal in which there are raised properly framed issues relating to all three of the sentencing issues raised sua sponte in every case by the Joan formula: a challenge to the trial court’s application of the sentencing guideline law (de novo review), a challenge to the court’s findings of fact as being unsupported in the record (clearly erroneous standard of review), and a challenge to the leniency or severity of the sentence — the court’s judgment call (reasonableness standard of review). I would allow the appellants to decide which sentencing guideline issues they wish to raise, and then employ, upon review, whatever standard of review is dictated by the specific issue raised.
In this case, for example, the only sentence issue raised on appeal is that the court’s “upward departure to twenty-seven months was not justified under the circumstances in the case and the recommendations according to the sentencing guidelines.” In explication, the defendant argues that the “defendant’s prior criminal history is less serious than was the defendant’s in Joan that “no aggravating circumstances existed in the present offense”; and that “the government did not recommend upward departure.” To the extent that the defendant’s argument raises any appellate issue at all, it appears to be that the sentencing court abused its discretion in departing upward to the extent of imposing a sentence of twenty-seven months when the guidelines called for a range of twelve to eighteen months.
The defendant does not claim that the law does not permit the trial court’s departure decision (hence no de novo review) or that the facts relied upon by the court for its departure decision are nonexistent (hence no clearly erroneous review).
While the defendant does not employ the term “reasonable” in complaining of the court’s departure decision, it can fairly be inferred that the argument that the departure “was not justified under the circumstances” is a claim that the departure sentence was not reasonable. However, since, historically, appellate courts review discretionary “judgment calls” upon an abuse of discretion standard and not by an evaluation for reasonableness, I would review the sentence issue in this case by testing the district court’s decision for abuse of discretion and conclude that there was no abuse.
IV.
Continued application of Joan with its three standards of review, offering something for everybody — indeed everything for everybody — is not likely to result in the narrowly focused, deferential appellate review of sentencing guidelines departure decision contemplated by Congress and the sentencing commission. It is also not likely to leave the legally sound, but controversial, disputable, discretionary judgment calls in departure sentencing — the tough ones — where they belong, with the trial courts.

. Joan is an "upward departure” case, but its three-part test is being applied in this court to upward and downward departure appeals. See United States v. Hays, 899 F.2d 515 (6th Cir.1990), United States v. Brewer, 899 F.2d 503 (6th Cir.1990). Because of the broad sweep of its three standards of review in one, Joan will undoubtedly appeal to some as suitable for reviewing other sentencing guidelines issues as well.

. The three-part Diaz-Villafane standard was first applied in this circuit in United States v. Rodriguez, 882 F.2d 1059 (1989), cert. denied, — U.S.-, 110 S.Ct. 1144, 107 L.Ed.2d 1048 (1990), but without discussion of its relative merit and without any express statement of adoption for this circuit.