Court Opinion

ID: 9492149
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:33:16.441178+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:08.237288
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in all but Part II C of the court’s opinion. With regard to the issues *340discussed in that part, I agree that a conspiracy to commit a robbery that would violate the Hobbs Act is itself a “crime of violence” within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). See United States v. Phan, 121 F.3d 149, 152-53 (4th Cir.1997), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 118 S.Ct. 1038, 140 L.Ed.2d 104 (1998) (“A Hobbs Act conspiracy to commit robbery ... is a separate crime of violence providing its own predicate for § 924(c)(1) liability”). I disagree, however, with the conclusion that under Bailey v. United States, 516 U.S. 137, 116 S.Ct. 501, 133 L.Ed.2d 472 (1995), no rational juror could find that defendant Taylor “used” a firearm during and in relation to the Hobbs Act conspiracy when he placed a firearm in the hands of the man who was expected to commit the robbery that was the object of the conspiracy.
The majority’s conclusion on this issue is contrary to the conclusion reached by the Fourth Circuit, under comparable circumstances, in Phan. I am not persuaded that Phan is inconsistent with Bailey, and I would affirm defendant Taylor’s § 924(c) conviction as well as affirming his conviction for conspiracy.
I
The § 924(c) conviction must be affirmed, under Bailey, if the record contains “evidence sufficient to show an active employment of the firearm by the defendant, a use that makes the firearm an operative factor in relation to the predicate offense.” Bailey, 516 U.S. at 143. “Active employment,” the Supreme Court has made clear, is not limited to the defendant’s brandishing the weapon or firing or attempting to fire it during and in relation to the predicate offense. See Smith v. United States, 508 U.S. 223, 113 S.Ct. 2050, 124 L.Ed.2d 138 (1993), where the predicate offense was a drug trafficking crime; there the court held that the defendant had “use[d]” the weapon during and in relation to the predicate offense when he bartered a gun for drugs.
Smith is not inconsistent with Bailey, as the latter decision explains. Notwithstanding that Smith “declined to limit ‘use’ to the meaning of ‘use as a weapon,’ ” Smith’s interpretation of § 924(c) “nonetheless adhered to an active meaning of the term.” Bailey, 516 U.S. at 148. It is thus no accident that Bailey’s illustrative list of uses that may constitute “active employment,” id., includes “bartering.” (“The active-employment understanding of ‘use’ certainly includes brandishing, displaying, bartering, striking with, and most obviously, firing or attempting to fire a firearm.”) (Emphasis supplied.)
The weapon in the case before us was not bartered, of course — but suppose, for purposes of analysis, that it had been. Suppose, in other words, that defendant Taylor had delivered the firearm to the prospective robber not for use in the robbery, but as a down-payment for the robber’s services. Bailey teaches that delivery of the firearm under these circumstances would “certainly” have been an “active employment” of the weapon during and in relation to the Hobbs Act robbery conspiracy. This being so, I am at a loss to understand why the delivery of the weapon to the prospective robber for use in the robbery itself would not likewise be an active employment of the weapon during and in relation to the conspiracy.
Delivery for the purpose of payment is no more “active” than delivery for the purpose of enhancing the robber’s firepower. It seems to me that each type of delivery — a delivery in payment for the prospective robber’s services and a delivery to promote the successful accomplishment of the robbery that is the object of the conspiracy — would qualify as “an active employment of the firearm by the defendant, a use that makes the firearm an operative factor in relation to the predicate [conspiracy] offense.” See Bailey, 516 U.S. at 143.
*341II
There are two appellate court decisions — one from this circuit — that strengthen me in this conclusion. The first is United States v. Anderson, 89 F.3d 1306 (6th Cir.1996), cert. denied, 519 U.S. 1100, 117 S.Ct. 786, 136 L.Ed.2d 728 (1997), where a panel of this court addressed the question whether a jury could find that a gun had been “used” in relation to a drug offense when there was evidence that the defendant was reaching for the weapon when law enforcement agents entered his apartment to search for drugs. Although the defendant’s conviction was set aside for instructional error, the panel expressly held that, under Bailey, “a defendant who reaches for a gun, whether the gun is visible or hidden, uses that gun for purposes of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c).” Id. at 1315.
The Anderson panel understood the lesson of Bailey to be that a gun could not be found to have been used in violation of § 924(c) absent “reliable objective manifestations of the defendant’s intent to use the gun in connection with the underlying offense.” Id. at 1314. Such an “objective manifestation” was found to be present in Anderson: “an act of reaching for the gun provides a generally reliable manifestation of defendant’s intent to use the gun in much the same way that ‘brandishing, displaying, bartering, striking with, and most obviously, firing or attempting to fire’ a gun provides such a similarly accurate manifestation of intent to use.” Id. at 1315.
In the case at bar, similarly, I should have thought that defendant Taylor’s delivery of the gun to the prospective robber “provide[d] a generally reliable manifestation” of the defendant’s intent to use the gun in connection with the Hobbs Act conspiracy that constituted the underlying offense. If so, under Anderson’s interpretation of Bailey, the defendant violated § 924(c).
The second decision, of course, is that of the Fourth Circuit in Phan — a case that involved a defendant’s delivery of two handguns to a prospective robber for use in the robbery. This act of delivery, the Fourth Circuit pointed out, “was in itself an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” Phan, 121 F.3d at 153.
In Phan, as here, the robbery never actually took place — but “[t]he relevant question,” as the court noted, “is whether [the defendant] actively employed the handguns during and in relation to the conspiracy, not whether the handguns were actively employed during and in relation to the robbery.” Id. (emphasis supplied). The Fourth Circuit did not read Bailey as foreclosing an affirmative answer to the question whether the handguns had been actively employed in relation to the conspiracy.
“[T]he nexus between the handguns and the conspiracy to commit robbery could not be closer,” the Fourth Circuit observed, the handguns having been transferred “in preparation for their eventual use during the robbery.” Id. The use made of the handguns in Phan would obviously have passed Anderson’s “objective manifestation” test, and it seems to me that the Fourth Circuit was correct in concluding that there was evidence of an active employment of the firearms, within the meaning of Bailey, during and in relation to the predicate conspiracy offense. Because I would reach the same conclusion here, I respectfully dissent from the reversal of Mr. Taylor’s § 924(c) conviction.