Court Opinion

ID: 9632440
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 11:14:58.620678+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:08:16.068771
License: Public Domain

LOKEN, Chief Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I join Parts I-IV of the court’s opinion. But I dissent from Part V, which misrepresents the sentencing record and ignores relevant prior decisions in contriving a supposed procedure error that imposes unnecessary burdens on a busy, careful and experienced sentencing judge, Chief Judge Michael J. Davis of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota.
1. Some ten years ago, at the urging of the Sentencing Commission, the Judicial Conference Criminal Law Committee reminded district judges that the Statement of Reasons portion of the judiciary’s Judgment in a Criminal Case form should be completed as part of every sentence. Compliance, which had been rather lax, is now nearly universal. The Statement of *663Reasons is a critical part of the sentencing record. It not only helps the Commission gather accurate sentencing data, it also gives the sentencing judge a chance to reflect on the sentence and to supplement, or even supplant, impromptu comments at the sentencing hearing that may have been incomplete or inaccurate. Here, Chief Judge Davis included a thirty-two-page Statement of Reasons in the Judgment five days after Smith’s hearing. Findings relating to ten enhancements took up twenty-two pages. After determining the advisory guidelines range, and reciting the advisory nature of the Guidelines7 and the sentencing factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), the Statement of Reasons explained:
Although the Court acknowledges its power to grant a variance from the Guideline range, the Court concludes that a sentence within the Guideline range is reasonable. Smith was a drug kingpin who received great financial gain from his illegal activities while consciously disregarding the risk of death or serious bodily injury to the addicts, upon whose addictions his profits were based.... Smith plotted to kill a Government witness and attempted to continue his fraudulent scheme in three different countries.... Smith has demonstrated that he does not obey Court orders and that, in the absence of a serious Guideline sentence, he is likely to reoffend____
Although the Court has concluded that a Guideline sentence is reasonable in this case, a sentence at the low end of the Guideline range is sufficient....
(Emphasis added.) Part V pays lip service to Chief Judge Davis’s Statement of Reasons but refuses to believe it.
2. Prior to the sentencing hearing, Smith filed a memorandum urging Chief Judge Davis to grant a variance down to the mandatory minimum sentence of 240 months in prison. As Part V notes, in denying Smith the ten-year downward variance he requested, Chief Judge Davis commented,' “if there’s a variance that’s going to be granted, it can’t be to 20 years because ... from 360 to 240, that’s automatic reversal.” The comment reflected our pre-Gall cases requiring that an extraordinary variance be justified by extraordinary circumstances, a formulation rejected in Gall. 128 S.Ct. at 595. However, as Part V acknowledges, the Supreme Court in Gall reaffirmed the proportionality principle when it stated, “We find it uncontroversial that a major departure should be supported by a more significant justification than a minor one,” id. at 597. Putting aside the hyperbolic reference to “automatic reversal,” and focusing on the Statement of Reasons, there was no procedural error in denying the variance Smith requested because Gall did not change the fact that, as Chief Judge Davis determined, Smith requested a “major departure” but presented no “significant justification.”
3. The Sentencing Commission’s “Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics” for the three fiscal years prior to Smith’s sentencing reveal that District of Minnesota judges granted downward judicial variances in 22%, 21 %, and 15% of their post -Booker cases, ranking seventh, eighth, and fifteenth out of the ninety-four federal district courts in that category. See Table 26 in the 2005, 2006, and 2007 Sourcebooks. Less than two months before Smith’s sentencing, and six months before the Supreme Court decided Gall, *664we affirmed Chief Judge Davis’s grant of a variance twenty months below the bottom of the advisory guidelines range, rejecting defendant’s argument that Chief Judge Davis mistakenly believed he lacked discretion to vary downward to the statutory minimum. United States v. Garcia, 236 Fed.Appx. 225, 225-26 (8th Cir.2007) (unpublished). Three months before Garcia, we affirmed another sentence in which Chief Judge Davis varied downward, rejecting the argument that he committed procedural error by treating the Guidelines as mandatory. United States v. Lynch, 477 F.3d 993, 998 (8th Cir.2007).
Part V emphasizes Chief Judge Davis’s comments at sentencing expressing frustration at being reversed “a number of times” for granting downward variances. But Chief Judge Davis expressly stated he was speaking “hypothetically,” and the comments referred to cases in which he varied downward from a prison sentence to a non-prison sentence, cases presenting the same type of variance later upheld in Gall. See United States v. Miller, 484 F.3d 964, 965-67 (8th Cir.2007), vacated and remanded, — U.S. —, 128 S.Ct. 871, 169 L.Ed.2d 715 (2008); United States v. Gayekpar, 211 Fed.Appx. 533, 535-36 (8th Cir.2007) (unpublished). In December 2006, we affirmed Judge Magnuson’s grant of a variance from eighteen months in prison to five years’ probation in a high-profile case, which demonstrated to District of Minnesota judges that even downward variances to non-prison sentences were not automatically reversed. United States v. Wadena, 470 F.3d 735, 736-37, 740 (8th Cir.2006). Particularly in light of the Statement of Reasons, Chief Judge Davis’s comments do not suggest a belief that he had no authority to grant a substantial variance to Smith.
The sentencing record in this case is a far cry from the sentencing records in the cases on which Part V relies, such as United States v. Greene, 513 F.3d 904, 907 (8th Cir.2008). Here, the entire sentencing record, including particularly the elaborate Statement of Reasons, leaves me with complete confidence that Chief Judge Davis would not have granted Smith a downward variance had the sentence been imposed a few months after, instead of a few months before, the Supreme Court’s decision in Gall. As the sentence was imposed without procedural error and is reasonable, it should be affirmed. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent from Part V.

. The court also described the Guidelines as “advisory'' at the sentencing hearing, before stating that it “will not vary.’’