Court Opinion

ID: 9552937
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 19:19:28.61199+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:29:24.227363
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
with whom
Chief Judge EASTERBROOK joins, concurring.
The Woods decision compels reversal, but I do not agree that the rule it lays down is sound. The rule is that if a statute punishes two crimes, one a crime of violence, one not, under the same name (in this case, “aggravated battery” defined as intentionally or knowingly making physical contact of an insulting or provoking nature with a pregnant woman), the defendant cannot be given the sentencing guidelines’ crime-of-violence enhancement unless the statute is generally violated by the crime of violence. It is not enough that, as in this case, as the per curiam opinion makes clear, the defendant committed the “crime of violence” version of the statutory offense, the statutory offense being battery of a pregnant woman.
A sentencing judge is not permitted to base a recidivist enhancement on conduct that violates a statute other than the one the defendant had been charged with violating. The judge is not to base the sentence on his “own conception of the offense actually constituted by the defendant’s conduct.” Stephen J. Schulhofer, “Due Process of Sentencing,” 128 U. Pa. L.Rev. 733, 757 (1980). He is not to “consider the nature and characteristics of the criminal conduct involved without regard to the offense charged.” Michael H. Tonry, “Real Offense Sentencing: The Model Sentencing and Corrections Act,” 72 J.Crim. L. & Criminology 1550, 1555-56 (1981) (emphasis in original).
Suppose, therefore, that Evans had been indicted and convicted of simple larceny based on his theft of Lauderdale’s television set, and at the guilty-plea hearing the prosecutor described the circumstances surrounding the theft, including the pushing of Lauderdale, and the defendant admitted under oath that the circumstances had been exactly as the prosecutor described. Nevertheless the district judge, in applying the guidelines in the present case, would not have been authorized to treat the defendant’s conviction of simple larceny (akin to stealing a bicycle from a bicycle stand, the owner being nowhere in *770sight) as a conviction of a crime of violence within the meaning of the sentencing guidelines. He would have to treat it as a conviction for a nonviolent crime because that was the only crime the defendant had been convicted of. See United States v. Lewis, 405 F.3d 511, 513-15 (7th Cir.2005); United States v. Bartee, 529 F.3d 357, 360-61 (6th Cir.2008). Having determined that the defendant had been convicted of a nonviolent crime, the judge could not go on to consider how the defendant had committed that crime, and, if he had used violence in the commission of it, enhance the sentence accordingly.
But since the statutory term “insulting or provoking” covers a range of kinds or concepts of battery, some of which create a serious risk of injury and some of which do not, and the indictment or other charging document does not indicate where in the range the defendant’s conduct fell, we can look at the record of the guilty-plea hearing to disambiguate the application of statute to the case. In Shepard v. United States, 544 U.S. 13, 125 S.Ct. 1254, 161 L.Ed.2d 205 (2005), the Supreme Court ruled that if burglary under state law includes entry into a boat, but “crime of violence” for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act requires entry into a building, the sentencing judge can, and in fact has to, look to the guilty-plea hearing to determine whether the defendant admitted to entering a building. See also Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575, 602, 110 S.Ct. 2143, 109 L.Ed.2d 607 (1990); Chambers v. United States, - U.S. -, 129 S.Ct. 687, 172 L.Ed.2d 484 (2009); United States v. Smith, 544 F.3d 781, 786-87 (7th Cir.2008); United States v. Rodriguez, 523 F.3d 519, 524 (5th Cir.2008); United States v. Rosa, 507 F.3d 142, 151-54 (2d Cir.2007).
Shepard was a case in which the same state criminal statute punished both conduct that was not a crime of violence under federal law and conduct that was: punished, in effect, two crimes, and the question was which the defendant had committed. To answer that question required knowing what the defendant had done. Admissions in a guilty-plea hearing, being judicial admissions, bind the defendant in subsequent proceedings and so avoid any occasion for the federal sentencing judge to determine contested facts regarding an earlier crime for purposes of deciding which niche it ñts in — the offense that is not a crime of violence or the offense that is, both being covered by the same statutory language. Brown v. Green, 738 F.2d 202, 206 (7th Cir.1984); Huerta-Guevara v. Ashcroft, 321 F.3d 883, 888 (9th Cir.2003). The making of such a factual determination would be objectionable as requiring trials within sentencing hearings and (if the result was to increase the maximum punishment of the defendant) infringing the right to trial by jury conferred by the Sixth Amendment. Taylor v. United States, supra, 495 U.S. at 600-02, 110 S.Ct. 2143; United States v. Shannon, 110 F.3d 382, 384-85 (7th Cir.1997) (en banc); United States v. Browning, 436 F.3d 780, 780-82 (7th Cir.2006); United States v. Rosa, supra, 507 F.3d at 152-53. The question in this case as in Taylor is not what the defendant did — that is not in dispute — but what crime he was convicted of. “Congress intended the sentencing court to look only to the fact that the defendant had been convicted of crimes falling within certain categories, and not to the facts underlying the prior convictions.” 495 U.S. at 600, 110 S.Ct. 2143.
It is the same here. A single statutory provision creates crimes both within the federal domain and outside it. In Chambers v. United States, supra, the two crimes were breaking out of a jail and failing to report for weekend confinement, and the Court held that the latter was not *771a crime of violence. In this case, the two crimes are a battery that causes or threatens physical injury and a battery that involves just an offensive touching and is punished not because it causes or even creates a risk of physical injury but because it might provoke a breach of the peace by the victim. The former but not the latter offense fits the definition of violent felony.
I cannot see what difference it makes that these crimes are not in separate sections of the battery statute. The division of a statute into sections has never been regarded as having substantive significance; it is merely a device for ease of reference. No Supreme Court decision attaches significance to the presence or absence of sections. If the same section covers two crimes, the court can look at the conceded facts of the defendant’s conduct to determine which crime the defendant committed. The “categorical” approach requires the court to identify the crime committed by the defendant and to stop there and not consider how he committed it — whether for example he committed a crime in a violent manner though violence was not an element of the crime. That limitation upon the court’s inquiry does not make “category” a synonym for “section.”
Since the indictment doesn’t indicate which kind of battery the defendant committed, we may look behind the indictment to the factual allegations that the defendant admitted in pleading guilty, and when we do this we learn that he not only shoved a pregnant woman to the ground but by shouting for “the girls” to beat her up made her fear a more serious physical injury — and the combination of physical force and fear of serious injury could induce a miscarriage. Cf. Brownback v. Frailey, 78 Ill.App. 262 (Ill.App.1898); Engle v. Simmons, 148 Ala. 92, 41 So. 1023, 1023-24 (1906); Whitsel v. Watts, 98 Kan. 508, 159 P. 401, 401-02 (1916); Kirby v. Jules Chain Stores Corp., 210 N.C. 808, 188 S.E. 625 (1936). In the language of the guideline, the defendant created “a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.”
In Taylor the Supreme Court said that “in a State whose burglary statutes include entry of an automobile as well as a building, if the indictment or information and jury instructions show that the defendant was charged only with a burglary of a building, and that the jury necessarily had to find an entry of a building to convict, then the Government should be allowed to use the conviction for enhancement.” 495 U.S. at 602, 110 S.Ct. 2143. If for “burglary” we substitute “battery,” for “automobile” a merely “offensive” touching, and for “building” creating a risk of physical harm by shoving a pregnant woman to the ground, we have this case.
Both in Shepard and in Chambers the two crimes that the Supreme Court considered were found in the same statutory section. 720 ILCS 5/12 — 4(b)(l 1) likewise punishes two separate crimes (so far as bears on this case) — offensive physical contact with a pregnant woman that does, and that does not, inflict bodily harm. We need to look to the charging document and the guilty-plea hearing to ■ determine, on the basis of the defendant’s admission, which crime he was convicted of. As shown in the charging papers and plea colloquy, he was convicted of the type of aggravated battery under Illinois law that fits within the generic federal definition of crime of violence. His sentence was therefore proper.
But since a majority of the court has voted not to rehear Woods, I bow to its precedential force and thus agree that the defendant’s sentence must be vacated.