Court Opinion

ID: 9487714
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:24:21.69173+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:26.602692
License: Public Domain

NIEMEYER, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment:
The opinions of Justice Scalia and Justice Kennedy in Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957, 111 S.Ct. 2680, 115 L.Ed.2d 836 (1991), representing a majority of the Supreme Court, support at most the application of a narrow proportionality principle that would have the Eighth Amendment forbid only “extreme sentences that are ‘grossly disproportionate’ to the crime.” 501 U.S. at 1001, 111 S.Ct. at 2705 (Kennedy, J., concurring). As Justice White’s dissenting opinion argues, 501 U.S. at 1009, 1020, 111 S.Ct. at 2709, 2715 (White, J., dissenting), the narrow proportionality test articulated by Justice Kennedy for the case before the Court appears to reduce the three-pronged test of Solem v. Helm, 463 U.S. 277, 103 S.Ct. 3001, 77 L.Ed.2d 637 (1983), to the single inquiry of whether the punishment was “grossly disproportionate” to the crime, a determination for which intrajurisdictional and interjurisdic-tional analyses may be relevant, but only in rare cases. See 501 U.S. at 1005, 111 S.Ct. at 2707 (Kennedy, J., concurring). The instant case, however, is assuredly not one of the rare cases to which Justice Kennedy refers. Accordingly, I do not believe that we should revert to applying the three-pronged proportionality test of Solem, as the majority in this case has elected to do. Rather, we should dispose of this case simply on the basis of the Harmelin holding. Harmelin held that a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole imposed by a state for possession of 672 grams of cocaine did not violate the Eighth Amendment. Because the case before us involves a life sentence for distribution of at least 18 kilograms of cocaine by a defendant who had two prior felony drug convictions, the holding of Harmelin is dispositive. Thus, any discussion by the majority about the appropriate*70ness of applying the Solem three-pronged test and the conclusion the majority reaches to do so are, I respectfully submit, mere dicta. More troubling, however, is the notion that through such dicta the court might tend improperly to suggest that the three-pronged proportionality test of Solem is still viable in eases such as this, despite the position taken by five justices in Harmelin.
For the foregoing reasons, I concur only in the judgment.