Court Opinion

ID: 9489523
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:17:47.820827+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:34.561762
License: Public Domain

WALLACE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I dissent from this amendment to our opinion. Simply because section 3565(a) authorizes district judges to resentence upon probation violation does not render the law of the case doctrine inapplicable to all aspects of resentencing. A sentencing court would often wish to avoid reopening certain issues that were resolved at the original sentencing hearing and that have no bearing on resen-tencing but which parties might wish to raise. An example might be a technical dispute concerning a computation of the defendant’s prior offense level. I believe a district court should be free to rely upon the law of the case doctrine to prevent the reopening of such issues. Such reliance would, in no way, limit the district court’s authority under section 3565(a) to reconsider other aspects of sentencing, most particularly downward departures for morally mitigating circumstances which, after probation violation, may no longer be appropriate.
The law of the case doctrine is flexible, even, as the Supreme Court has said, “amorphous.” Arizona v. California, 460 U.S. 605, 618, 103 S.Ct. 1382, 1391, 75 L.Ed.2d 318 (1983). The amended language constricts the doctrine to an unnecessary degree as it holds that whenever a statute explicitly authorizes a district court to reconsider an issue, the law of the case doctrine has no place. There is no citation of precedent for this position. This is not surprising as the position is not tenable. To the contrary, we ' should allow district courts to rely on the law of the case doctrine to avoid efficiently reconsideration of issues not relevant to probation violation resentencing. See IB James C. Moore & Jo Desha Lucas, Moore’s Federal Practice ¶ 0.404[1] (2d ed. 1995) (“[at] the trial court level, the doctrine of the law of the case is little more than a management practice to permit logical progression toward judgments efficient disposition of the case demands that each stage of the litigation build on the last”).