Court Opinion

ID: 9494331
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:35:43.095659+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:21.679629
License: Public Domain

*596KING, Chief Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment:
I concur in the judgment, together with Parts I, II.A-D, II.F-G, and III of Judge Jones’s opinion (the “Opinion”). However, I respectfully disagree with the representation of our Apprendi jurisprudence set out in Part II.E of the Opinion.
I agree with the Opinion that our Ap-prendi precedent “compelfs]” this panel to vacate the defendants’ sentences that exceeded the statutory maximum authorized for the offense stated in the indictment. However, the Opinion also asserts that our “approach to [Apprendi] cases has not been fully consistent” and classifies those cases into various purportedly conflicting groups. That characterization of our Ap-prendi jurisprudence is inaccurate.
United States v. Meshack, 225 F.3d 556 (5th Cir.2000), and the cases in the Opinion’s “group two,” i.e., United States v. Miranda, 248 F.3d 434 (5th Cir.2001), United States v. Green, 246 F.3d 433 (5th Cir.2001), and United States v. Slaughter, 238 F.3d 580 (5th Cir.2000), are not, as the Opinion claims, contradictory in their review of unpreserved Apprendi error. In all four cases, this court (1) recognized that under Apprendi, drug quantity was an element of the offense for which the defendant had been sentenced, and (2) applied plain error review because that sentencing issue was raised for the first time on appeal. See Miranda, 248 F.3d at 443, 445; Green, 246 F.3d at 436-37; Slaughter, 238 F.3d at 583-84; Meshack, 225 F.3d at 577-78. The different outcomes in those cases is attributable to the type of Apprendi error at issue. In Meshack, the element of drug quantity was omitted from the indictment. But in Slaughter, Miranda, and Green, the element of drug quantity, although stated in the indictment, was omitted from the jury instruction.
Unlike Meshack, the indictments in Slaughter, Miranda, and Green charged all the elements of the offense for which the defendants were convicted and sentenced. This court’s analyses in Slaughter, Miranda, and Green are straightforward applications of Apprendi, consistent with controlling precedent on omission of an element from the jury instruction. In such a situation, even when the error is plain, we conduct harmless error review. See Neder v. United States, 527 U.S. 1, 10, 119 S.Ct. 1827, 144 L.Ed.2d 35 (1999) (holding that jury instructions that erroneously omit an element of the offense are subject to harmless error analysis). Under Neder, the error is harmful only if “the record contains evidence that could rationally lead to a contrary finding with respect to the omitted element.” Id. at 19, 119 S.Ct. 1827. Applying harmless error review, we found in Slaughter, Miranda, and Green that based on the evidence, a jury could not rationally have found that the defendant was not responsible for the drug quantity stated in the indictment. Miranda, 248 F.3d at 446;1 Green, 246 F.3d at 436-37; Slaughter, 238 F.3d at 583-84. Thus, a sentence revision was not required in those cases.
Similarly, this court’s analysis in Mesh-ack is a straightforward application of Ap-prendi, but, of course, is consistent with controlling precedent on omission of an element from the indictment. Because the indictment in Meshack did not include *597the quantity of crack cocaine, the indictment charged a crime that carried a statutory maximum of 30 years. However, the sentence imposed on one of the defendants exceeded 30 years. Therefore, the defendant was entitled to be resentenced in accordance with the crime for which he had been charged and convicted. See Meshack, 225 F.3d at 576-78; see also, e.g., United States v. Cabrera-Teran, 168 F.3d 141, 143 (5th Cir.1999) (“To be sufficient, an indictment must allege each material element of the offense; if it does not, it fails to charge that offense.”); United States v. Fitzgerald, 89 F.3d 218, 221 (5th Cir.1996) (“[I]f raised for the first time on appeal and the appellant does not assert prejudice, that is, if he had notice of the crime of which he stood accused, the indictment is sufficient unless it is so defective that by any reasonable construction, it fails to charge the offense for which the defendant is convicted.”) (emphasis added); United States v. Outler, 659 F.2d 1306, 1311 (5th Cir. Unit B Oct.1981) (“Unless every element of an offense appears in the indictment, it is impossible to assure the defendant that a grand jury properly determined probable cause of the offense.”) (emphasis added). Meshack does not conflict with Slaughter, Miranda, and Green; the latter cases simply arose in a fundamentally different context.
The cases constituting the Opinion’s so-called “third group” are similar to Mesh-ack because the error was in the indictment’s omission of a fact that was an element under Apprendi (i.e., drug quantity that was used to enhance the sentence beyond the statutory maximum). Applying Apprendi, those cases held, like Mesh-ack, that the sentences exceeded the statutory maximum of the crime charged in the indictment, and resentencing was required under the plain error standard. See United States v. Gonzalez, 259 F.3d 355, 359-61 (5th Cir.2001), vacated and reh’g en banc granted (5th Cir. Aug. 15, 2001); United States v. Longoria, 259 F.3d 363, 365 (5th Cir.2001), vacated and reh’g en banc granted (5th Cir. Aug. 15, 2001); United States v. Vasquez-Zamora, 253 F.3d 211, 214 (5th Cir.2001); United States v. Garcia, 242 F.3d 593, 599 n. 5 (5th Cir.2001).2
The Opinion also errs in singling out Gonzalez as a particularly problematic instance of inconsistency in our Apprendi precedent. First, Gonzalez is inapposite to cases such as Slaughter, Miranda, and Green because they did not concern defective indictments. Second, Gonzalez is also distinguishable from Garcia because Garcia involved de novo review. See supra note 2 (explaining that the Garcia defendant had preserved his Apprendi challenges by raising them below). Third, Gonzalez, like Meshack and Vasquez-Za-. mora, applied plain error review. See Gonzalez, 259 F.3d 355, 359. Finally, the outcome in Gonzalez is nothing new. Rather, the Gonzalez court, like the Vasquez-Zamora court, exercised its discretion under the fourth prong of plain error *598review to correct the error because the offense actually stated in the indictment (without a drug quantity) carried a statutory maximum less than the sentence that was imposed.
Gonzalez explained that because of the jurisdictional “nature” of the error (which is discussed below), evidence of the drug quantity at trial or the defendant’s acknowledgment of the quantity was irrelevant and could not cure the grand jury’s lack of notice of the quantity element (which was an element only because it was used to enhance the sentence). See id. at 360 n. 3. The Gonzalez court also pointed out that the fact that the grand jury did not pass upon the quantity factor did not mean that the conviction failed to charge any offense, but merely that it did not charge the aggravated offense. That is, the quantity omission from the indictment did not render the conviction deficient, but rather resulted in a sentencing error. See id. Thus, the court had jurisdiction, i.e., the authority, to sentence the defendant only under the offense as stated in the indictment, and not under an offense that required the additional element of drug quantity.
By noting that “Gonzalez may have properly interpreted this court’s attachment to precision in indictments,” see supra Opinion at note 11, the Opinion acknowledges that the omission of an element from the indictment “may” trigger a different legal analysis than that triggered by the omission of an element from the jury instruction. The Opinion attempts to diminish the significance of that consideration, however, by stating that “Apprendi expressly declined to deal with the constitutional implication of sufficiency of the indictment.” See supra Opinion at note 11. To be clear, the Apprendi Court did not address the indictment issue because the Presentment Clause of the Fifth Amendment has not been made applicable to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment. See Apprendi at 477 n. 3, 120 S.Ct. 2348. The Opinion’s suggestion that Ap-prendi may be limited to the rights to a trial by jury and to a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of proof is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Ap-prendi.
Apprendi is the Court’s latest addition to a subset of cases in the Court’s Fifth and Sixth Amendment jurisprudence drawing a constitutional line between “sentencing factors” and “elements.” Appren-di held that “[ojther than the fact of a prior conviction, any fact that increases the statutory maximum penalty beyond the prescribed statutory maximum” is an element. It follows (1) that defendants such as Apprendi, who are subject to a state prosecution, are entitled to have such facts submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and (2) that defendants such as those in this case, who are subject to federal prosecution, are entitled to those same rights and to the right to be tried and sentenced only upon an indictment by a grand jury.
Indeed, in the Apprendi opinion itself, the Court contrasted the state prosecution before it with the federal prosecution challenged in Almendarez-Torres v. United States, 523 U.S. 224, 118 S.Ct. 1219, 140 L.Ed.2d 350 (1998). See Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 477 n. 3, 120 S.Ct. 2348. In Almendarez-Torres, the Supreme Court stated that if 18 U.S.C. § 1326(b)(2) “constitute[d] a separate crime, then the Government must write an indictment that mentions the additional element.” See 523 U.S. at 226, 118 S.Ct. 1219. More importantly, the Apprendi Court explicitly adopted as its holding “the opinion that we expressed in [Jones v. United States, 526 U.S. 227, 119 S.Ct. 1215, 143 L.Ed.2d 311 *599(1999) ].” Id. at 490, 120 S.Ct. 2348. In Jones, a case involving a federal prosecution, the Court stated that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments require that “any fact (other than prior conviction) that increases the maximum penalty for a crime must be charged in an indictment, submitted to a jury, and proven beyond a reasonable doubt.” 526 U.S. at 243 n. 6, 119 S.Ct. 1215 (emphasis added).3
Thus, the Opinion cannot reconcile the purported conflict that the Opinion attributes to the difference between our “Ap-prendi indictment” cases and our “Appren-di jury instruction” cases by concluding that it may be unnecessary to include in the indictment those facts that Apprendi deems to be elements — i.e., facts that trigger a sentence that exceeds the statutory maximum prescribed in the absence of that fact. The other means of “reconciliation” that the Opinion appears to suggest is also unworkable. In assessing the Apprendi challenges, the Opinion states that authorities “other” than Slaughter, Miranda, and Green compel us to vacate the defendants’ sentences in this case. However, the Opinion posits, applying the Necfer/rational jury standard invoked in Slaughter, Miranda, and Green to this case would lead to the conclusion that “the chances are virtually nil that the jury ... would have found that the appellants distributed less than [the quantities necessary to justify their sentences].”
As explained above, Miranda, Slaughter, and Green are inapposite to the instant case because they dealt with defective jury instructions, not defective indictments. Thus, the harmless error (rational jury) inquiry utilized in those cases is inapplicable here. Our precedent clearly dictates that Appellants (except Franklin) are to be resentenced for the crime for which they were charged. That result is also required by Supreme Court precedent, which makes clear that the rational-jury inquiry is irrelevant where an element is omitted from the indictment, because the petit jury has no authority to determine elements that were not presented to the grand jury. See, e.g., Russell v. United States, 369 U.S. 749, 770, 82 S.Ct. 1038, 8 L.Ed.2d 240 (1962) (“To allow the prosecutor, or the court, to make a subsequent guess as to what was in the minds of the grand jury at the time they returned the indictment would deprive the defendant of a basic protection which the guaranty of the intervention of a grand jury was designed to secure. For a defendant could then be convicted on the basis of facts not found by, and perhaps not even presented to, the grand jury which indicted him.”); Stirone v. United States, 361 U.S. 212, 215-16, 80 S.Ct. 270, 4 L.Ed.2d 252 (1960) (stating that “after an indictment has been returned its charges may not be broadened through amendment except by the grand jury itself’); Ex parte Bain, 121 U.S. 1, 12-13, 7 S.Ct. 781, 30 L.Ed. 849 (1887) (stating that “an indictment found by a grand jury [is] indispensable to the power of the court to try the [defendant]”); see also United States v. Promise, 255 F.3d 150, 168 (4th Cir.2001) (en banc)(Niemeyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (listing cases and stating that “it is utterly meaningless to posit that any rational grand jury could or would have indicted the defendant because it is plain that this grand jury did not, and, absent waiver, a constitutional verdict cannot be had on an unin-dicted offense” (internal quotations, alterations, and citation omitted)); id. at 186-95 (Motz, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part, and dissenting in the judgment).
*600The Opinion suggests that we may disregard the longstanding Supreme Court precedent on indictments because “the Court’s most recent pronouncement on the subject indicated that grand jury errors, like others in the trial process, may be subject to a harmless error analysis.” Supra Opinion at note 15 (citing United States v. Mechanik, 475 U.S. 66, 70, 106 S.Ct. 938, 89 L.Ed.2d 50 (1986)). But the Mechanik Court addressed an error in the proceedings before the grand jury — not a deficiency in the indictment. 475 U.S. at 67, 106 S.Ct. 938 (assuming “that the simultaneous presence and testimony of the two Government witnesses before the grand jury violated [Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure] 6(d)”). The Court did, however, address such a deficiency in a decision issued just one year before Me-chanik.
In United States v. Miller, the Court addressed the question “whether the Fifth Amendment’s grand jury guarantee is violated when a defendant is tried under an indictment that alleges a certain fraudulent scheme but is convicted based on trial proof that supports only a significantly narrower and more limited, though included, fraudulent scheme.” 471 U.S. 130, 131, 105 S.Ct. 1811, 85 L.Ed.2d 99 (1985). In contrast to Mechanik, the Miller Court did not consider what the petit jury did or might have done if the alleged error had not occurred. Rather, the Court focused on the indictment itself, and whether the variance had deprived the defendant of his right to be convicted and sentenced only on charges presented to a grand jury. See id. at 135-45, 105 S.Ct. 1811. Importantly, in concluding that the indictment did not violate the defendant’s Fifth Amendment right to a grand jury, the Court stated: “The variance complained of added nothing new to the grand jury’s indictment and constituted no broadening.” Id. at 145, 105 S.Ct. 1811 (emphasis added). In this case, the drug quantity on which the defendants’ sentences were based did add something new — i.e., an element. Consequently, the defendants (other than Franklin) were sentenced for a greater crime than the one with which they had been charged and of which they had been convicted. Thus, under the relevant Supreme Court precedent, those defendants’ sentences must be vacated.
The Opinion also asserts that the First, Fourth, and Eleventh Circuits have, under plain error review, affirmed enhanced sentences in cases in which the quantity was not stated in the indictment. See United States v. Promise, 255 F.3d 150 (4th Cir.2001) (en banc); United States v. Pease, 240 F.3d 938 (11th Cir.2001); United States v. Nealy, 232 F.3d 825 (11th Cir.2000); United States v. Mojica-Baez, 229 F.3d 292 (1st Cir.2000). As the Opinion recognizes, in Promise, the en banc Fourth Circuit did not obtain a majority for the proposition that under plain error review a court may choose not to correct a sentence that is enhanced beyond the maximum for the offense stated in the indictment. A majority of the court agreed that Appren-di applied to the drug trafficking offenses stated in § 841 and that an Apprendi error occurred in the case. A different majority affirmed the conviction and sentence. That majority consisted partly of those who believed that the Apprendi error did not pass muster under the fourth prong of plain error review and partly of those who believed that no Apprendi error had occurred in the case.
Two judges who voted to affirm the sentence explicitly stated that if they were to proceed from the premise that an Ap-prendi error had occurred, then they would be bound by Supreme Court and appellate precedent to conclude that they must correct the sentencing error. See Promise, 255 F.3d at 168 (Niemeyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (stating that *601“[i]f quantity were an element of an aggravated offense, such an offense was not charged, and any sentence could not have been based on that offense”). Six judges stated that under the plain error standard, not only did a plain error affecting substantial rights occur, but also that the error must not be allowed to stand. See generally id. at 186-95 (Motz, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part, and dissenting in the judgment); see also id. at 187 (stating that the “imposition of [a sentence for a crime for which the defendant was never charged or convicted] is antithetical to our system of justice” and that it “[deprived the defendant] of the most fundamental of rights — the right to be tried and convicted only on charges presented in an indictment returned by a grand jury”).
The Eleventh Circuit, in Pease, and the First Circuit, in Mojicar-Baez, did apply plain error analysis to the omission of an element from the indictment and affirm sentences exceeding the statutory maximum prescribed for the offense charged in the indictment. Pease, 240 F.3d at 944; Mojica-Baez, 229 F.3d at 311-12, Applying plain error review, the Pease court concluded that the omission of drug quantity from the indictment did not affect the defendant’s “substantial rights” because he admitted to the necessary quantity of cocaine in his plea.4 In Mojicar-Baez, the court extended Neder to cases where an element is missing from the indictment. See Mojica-Baez, 229 F.3d at 306-12.
However, the Opinion neglects to mention the cases that are contrary to Pease and Mojica-Baez. For instance, in United States v. Tran, the Second Circuit explicitly rejected Mojica-Baez and stated that generally “the indictment as returned limits the scope of the district court’s jurisdiction to the offense charged in the indictment.” See 234 F.3d 798, 809 (2d Cir.2000). While Tran went even further than we did in Gonzalez and stated that plain error review is inappropriate when an indictment is missing an essential element, see id. at 806, it recognized (as did a majority of the Fourth Circuit judges in Promise) that Neder, a jury instruction case, cannot be transplanted to the indictment context, see id. at 809 n. 2.
This brief analysis of our sister circuits’ cases demonstrates that Gonzalez is by no means alone in its approach. Most of these cases are either in line with Gonzalez or inapposite to Gonzalez. Moreover, Gonzalez is faithful to longstanding Supreme Court precedent regarding the grand jury and the indictment.
The Opinion’s claim that our Apprendi cases are inconsistent is based entirely on the proposition that those cases apply the same standard of review and produce different outcomes. That, of course, is often the ease when the error reviewed in one set of cases (omission of an element from the indictment) is not the same as the error reviewed in the other set of cases (omission of an element from the jury instruction). Comparing apples with oranges, the Opinion unfairly maligns this circuit’s Apprendi jurisprudence. Our precedent as a whole dictates that we vacate the § 841 sentences of all Appellants, except Franklin’s § 841 prison sentence, and remand for resentencing.

. While we did not explicitly cite to Neder in Miranda, we conducted a harmless error inquiry within the plain error framework as required by Neder. See Miranda, 248 F.3d at 446 (stating that it was "highly unlikely that a jury ... would find drug quantities attributable to each defendant to be different from the amounts attributed to each defendant in the PSRs”).

. The Opinion appears to fault these cases for raising the Apprendi issue sua sponte. I am not generally an advocate for sua sponte review. But, in fairness to the panels that decided these cases, they did not feature the "classic” sua sponte situation — i.e., the court did not notice the Apprendi issue entirely of its own initiative. In Gonzalez and its companion case, Longoria, the government raised the Apprendi issue. See Gonzalez, 259 F.3d 355, 359. In Vasquez-Zamora, while the defendants had not raised Apprendi challenges as to their prison sentences, they had done so with regard to their supervised release terms. See Vasquez-Zamora, 253 F.3d at 214 & n. 4.
In Garcia, the defendant had also challenged his supervised release term on appeal, but not his prison sentence. See id. at 599 & n. 5. However, because the defendant had challenged his prison sentence on Apprendi grounds below, the court conducted de novo review. See id. at 599.

. See also Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 510-11, 120 S.Ct. 2348 (Thomas, J., concurring) (emphasizing that indictments must contain all elements of the offense).

. In Nealy, the other Eleventh Circuit case cited by the Opinion, the court explicitly declined to decide the indictment issue as it related to Apprendi because it was not properly raised. See 232 F.3d at 830-31. As did this court in Slaughter, Miranda, and Green, the Nealy court addressed the erroneous jury instructions under the familiar Neder standard. See id. at 829-30.