Court Opinion

ID: 9490797
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:55:13.822525+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:19.729467
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
concurring and dissenting.
I agree that this case must be remanded to the district court for a new decision on the question of whether a departure in Mr. Ka-pitzke’s case is warranted. But I do not agree that Mr. Kapitzke’s susceptibility to abuse in prison is not a matter that the district court can properly weigh in making that decision. In fact, in Koon the Court said that a defendant’s susceptibility to abuse was “just the sort of determination that must be accorded deference by the appellate courts.” — U.S. at -, 116 S.Ct. at 2053. In Koon, moreover, the district court did not have any record from which to conclude that the defendants in that case were susceptible to abuse; it merely took judicial notice of the “widespread publicity and emotional outrage” that the case had generated. In this case, the district court simply took judicial notice of some other well known fact.
Despite the misgivings of the court in this case, I see no realistic possibility that allowing departures in these kinds of cases runs the risk of “thwarting the Guidelines’ sentences” for crimes like Mr. Kapitzke’s. I am not suggesting that courts must always depart in these kinds of cases, only that we cannot properly hold that it is error to do so. The government, for its part, can always offer proof of its efforts, if any, to protect persons convicted of these kinds of crimes. *825In any event, I see no difference in allowing a departure because of Mr. Kapitzke’s “classification as a child pornographer,” as the court puts it, and allowing one where the defendant is a policeman, a factor to which the Court in Koon alluded in upholding a departure for susceptibility to abuse. Both kinds of cases involve classifications of a kind.
I therefore respectfully dissent from the portion of the court’s opinion that holds that the district court erred in relying on Mr. Kapitzke’s susceptibility to abuse in prison in departing from the sentence that the Guidelines presumptively fixed for his crime.