Court Opinion

ID: 9497956
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:04:37.683612+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:31.714532
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
with whom SMITH, Circuit Judge, joins, dissenting.
I concur in all of the court’s opinion except the portion of it that holds that Mr. Pirani is not entitled to plain error relief.
I believe that the court misses an opportunity in not adopting the highly practical resolution reached in United States v. Paladino, 401 F.3d 471 (7th Cir.2005), where the court remanded the case to allow the sentencing judge to certify whether he would have given a different sentence had he treated the guidelines merely as advisory. Our court rejects this solution as an improper delegation of its authority, but this characterization misses the mark. A remand in the instant circumstances is not a delegation of anything; it is simply a device to gather facts relevant to determining the answer to a question that it is our duty to answer. That question is whether the district court would have given a different sentence had it been prescient enough to foresee Booker. The answer to that question is hard to divine on the present record. Why not find out? In responding to that question, the district court would not be doing our job; its response would enable us to do our job.
The court’s reluctance to remand is especially difficult to understand in this case, since, as the court itself points out, the district court twice expressed its dislike of the sentencing guidelines, remarked that an alternative sentencing possibility was “too high,” and sentenced Mr. Pirani to the lowest guideline sentence available. It might even be that, this record by itself creates a sufficient likelihood that the court would have given Mr. Pirani a lower sentence under the Booker regime that a remand for resentencing is warranted under our previous cases. See, e.g., United States v. Warren, 361 F.3d 1055, 1059 (8th Cir.2004). At the very least, the record supports a short delay to ask the district court whether it would have imposed a different sentence.
A harder question for me is whether Mr. Pirani will suffer a miscarriage of justice here if the district court would have given him a shorter sentence had it been fully aware of the requirements of Booker. It might reasonably be argued that since the sentence that was imposed is not unreasonable under Booker, it could hardly be a miscarriage of justice. But we have given plain error relief under the former regime where a district court applied the wrong guideline, see, e.g., United States v. Weaver, 161 F.3d 528, 530 (8th Cir.1998), and I think that the present case is sufficiently similar to these cases that it falls within their rule. To put it simply, it is unjust for a person to be deprived for a substantial time of his most prized right, his liberty, because of a fundamental misapprehension of law by a court of the United States.
I therefore respectfully dissent.