Court Opinion

ID: 9491004
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:01:03.50339+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:27.277320
License: Public Domain

CALABRESI, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I agree with most of the majority opinion, and join Parts I and II of it. I do not, however, find the majority’s discussion of due process satisfactory. Specifically, I am not convinced that a- defendant has no liberty interest in choosing intelligently between pre-trial detention that results in credit against an eventual prison sentence, and home confinement that does not. And I do not find helpful the majority’s reliance on cases that deal with situations, like prison transfers, where no choice is involved. It is far more damaging to a person’s liberty to be made to be the unwitting (because uninformed) instrument of one’s own undoing than it is to be subjected, even arbitrarily, to automatic transfer.
The existence of some liberty interest does not necessarily mean that the Constitution requires that a magistrate judge, who is proposing home confinement, inform a defendant that no credit against eventual prison time will be granted. Cf. Michel v. United States, 507 F.2d 461, 464-66 (2d Cir.1974) (holding, despite the clear liberty interest in avoiding deportation, that a defendant entering a plea of guilty has no right to be informed that his resulting conviction will render him deportable). Accordingly, if the question this case poses were an open one in our circuit, we would have to undertake’a full discussion of Justice Ginsburg’s concerns in Reno v. Koray, 515 U.S. 50, 65, 115 S.Ct. 2021, 2029, 132 L.Ed.2d 46 (1995) (Ginsburg, J., concurring), and make a serious attempt to rationalize the prior cases (which go in different directions in deciding whether or not information must be given). But the case before us follows a fortiori from our decision in United States v. Parkins, 25 F.3d 114, 118-19 (2d Cir.1994). Because Parkins binds us, I respectfully concur in the result *726while rejecting the majority’s dicta concerning liberty interests.