Court Opinion

ID: 9483790
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:31:33.432639+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:50.211592
License: Public Domain

RICHARD S. ARNOLD, Chief Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I fully agree with the Court that the District Court properly increased Morse’s base offense level under § 4B1.3 of the Guidelines, relating to an offense committed as part of a pattern of criminal conduct engaged in as a livelihood. I also join that portion of the Court’s opinion discussing Morse’s Eighth Amendment argument. This argument is, in my view, frivolous.
As to the upward departure, however, I respectfully dissent. The District Court based the upward departure on three separately listed factors: previous convictions not counted in Morse’s criminal-history score, pending charges, and the failure of previous sentences to deter Morse. I have no quarrel with two of these factors — the previous convictions not counted and the failure of previous sentences to deter. The use of pending charges, though, seems to me a mistake. I do not see how the fact that someone is charged with a crime — a charge which has not yet been tried and may never be — can be used against him. A charge is merely an accusation. A person charged is still entitled to the presumption of innocence until his guilt has been properly established. It is quite true that “uncharged conduct,” ante at 854, can be used against a defendant for sentencing purposes. But here there is no “conduct,” but only accusations that criminal conduct has occurred.
The word “conduct,” I should think, refers to what somebody has actually done, not merely what someone else has accused *856him of doing. If there were evidence establishing by a preponderance that Morse had actually done the things of which the pending charges accuse him, well and good. But as I understand this record, there is no such evidence. There are only “pending charges,” and surely the fact of a governmental accusation, without more, is not sufficient evidence (if it is any evidence at all) to establish guilt by a preponderance. We know only that Morse has two pending charges in a state court for fraud. We do not know whether he is guilty. We do not even know whether the charges will ever be tried.
In this situation, I cannot agree that there is sufficient evidence of uncharged conduct to warrant this particular ground asserted by the District Court in support of an upward departure. The other two grounds, both of them valid, remain, and the District Court might well have departed upward to the same degree based only on these two grounds. The Court, however, did not say that it would have done so, nor is it otherwise apparent from the record that the same sentence would have been imposed absent the Court’s consideration of the pending charges. In this situation, we should, in my view, reverse this sentence and remand it to the District Court for reconsideration. If the District Court imposes the same sentence on remand, leaving out of account the improper factor of pending charges, it would be within its rights, in my opinion, but I cannot vote to affirm a sentence that apparently is based in part on mere accusation.