Court Opinion

ID: 9842658
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:11:42.392117+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:13:24.778593
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
At the initial status hearing on Macca-do’s indictment, the district court ordered him to provide a federal agent a handwriting sample. Maceado disappeared. The district court’s discussion of Maccado’s explanation, recounted in the majority opinion (“Maj. Op.”) at 768-69, strikes me as somewhat ambiguous, but I accept the majority’s reading: namely that the court, rather than finding the explanation insufficient, simply disbelieved it. On that view, Maccado’s disappearance looks like a deliberate and considered decision to pursue a course tending to delay the enforcement of the criminal law, and perhaps to thwart it. On that assumption we must consider whether there was error in the district court’s decision under the Sentencing Guidelines to add a two-point enhancement for obstruction of justice under § 3C1.1.
In the course of affirming, the majority appears to establish a lower threshold for enhancement than § 3C1.1 permits. The Guidelines provide for the enhancement “[i]f the defendant willfully obstructed or impeded, or attempted to obstruct or impede, the administration of justice during the investigation, prosecution, or sentencing of the instant offense.” U.S.S.G. § 3C1.1. To elucidate this language the Sentencing Commission has included in its commentary two nonexhaustive lists, one of acts qualifying for the enhancement and the other of non-qualifying acts. We owe the commentary deference. Stinson v. United States, 508 U.S. 36, 38, 113 S.Ct. 1913, 123 L.Ed.2d 598 (1993); see also U.S.S.G. § 1B1.7 (1995). Defendant’s conduct is not among the specific examples, so we must try to discern the pattern and see where Maccado’s conduct fits best.
To help the reader navigate through the two lists, I offer in advance the general principles that the Fifth Circuit has drawn from them. It found that the enhancement should depend on the inherent tendency of the conduct actually to obstruct justice and on the deliberateness of defendant’s behavior: “(1) whether the conduct ‘presents an inherently high risk that justice will be obstructed;’ and (2) whether the conduct ‘requires a significant amount of planning,’ as opposed to being ‘the result of a spur of the moment decision’ or ‘stem[ming] from merely panic, confusion, or mistake.’ ” United States v. Phillips, 210 F.3d 345, 348 (5th Cir.2000) (internal citation omitted). The acts listed by the commentary as qualifying for enhancement are, in the Fifth Circuit’s view, ones that are “egregiously wrongful,” involving both considerable advance planning and a high risk of derailing an investigation or prosecution. United States v. Greer, 158 F.3d 228, 235 (5th Cir.1998). In support it points to language in the commentary noting the range of “degree of planning[ ] and seriousness” that obstruction of justice issues may present. Id. at 234. In fact, I question whether every item in the Com*774mission’s lists handily fits the Fifth Circuit’s explanation, but it is a useful starting point.
Application Note 3 gives a non-exhaustive list of acts calling for enhancement:
(a) threatening, intimidating, or otherwise unlawfully influencing a co-defendant, witness, or juror, directly or indirectly, or attempting to do so;
(b) committing, suborning, or attempting to suborn perjury;
(c) producing or attempting to produce a false, altered, or counterfeit document or record during an official investigation or judicial proceeding;
(d) destroying or concealing or directing or procuring another person to destroy or conceal evidence that is material to an official investigation or judicial proceeding (e.g., shredding a document or destroying ledgers upon learning that an official investigation has commenced or is about to commence), or attempting to do so; however, if such conduct occurred contemporaneously with arrest (e.g., attempting to swallow or throw away a controlled substance), it shall not, standing alone, be sufficient to warrant an adjustment for obstruction unless it resulted in a material hindrance to the official investigation or prosecution of the instant offense or the sentencing of the offender;
(e) escaping or attempting to escape from custody before trial or sentencing; or willfully failing to appear, as ordered, for a judicial proceeding;
(f) providing materially false information to a judge or magistrate;
(g) providing a materially false statement to a law enforcement officer that significantly obstructed or impeded the official investigation or prosecution of the instant offense;
(h) providing materially false information to a probation officer in respect to a presentence or other investigation for the court;
(i)conduct prohibited by 18 U.S.C. §§ 1501-1516.
This adjustment also applies to any other obstructive conduct in respect to the official investigation, prosecution, or sentencing of the instant offense where there is a separate count of conviction for such conduct.
U.S.S.G. § 3C1.1, Application Note 3. Many of these acts easily score on both the factors identified by the Fifth Circuit. Example (g), however, seems to embrace a defendant’s spontaneous deception of a law enforcement officer — but only if the deception in fact generates a “significant” obstruction or impediment.
Application Note 4 gives examples of conduct not qualifying for an enhancement:
The following is a non-exhaustive list of examples of the types of conduct that, absent a separate count of conviction for such conduct, do not warrant application of this enhancement, but ordinarily can appropriately be sanctioned by the determination of the particular sentence within the otherwise applicable guideline range:
(a) providing a false name or identification document at arrest, except where such conduct actually resulted in a significant hindrance to the investigation or prosecution of the instant offense;
(b) making false statements, not under oath, to law enforcement officers, unless Application Note 3(g) above applies;
(c) providing incomplete or misleading information, not amounting to a material falsehood, in respect to a presen-tence investigation;
(d) avoiding or fleeing from arrest (see, however, § 3C1.2 (Reckless Endangerment During Flight)).
U.S.S.G. § 3C1.1, Application Note 4. Given Note 3(g) and the second part of Note 3(d), and the re-appearance of concern for actual obstructive effect in 4(a) and 4(b), I might amend the Fifth Cir*775cuit’s classification to say that generally the enhancement is due (1) when the conduct is the result of planning and is highly likely to cause a serious derailment of the process, or (2) when conduct, even if spontaneous, actually does cause such a derailment. Such a view puts the risk of derailment largely on the perpetrator. Other courts appear to rely on the distinction between planned and high risk conduct, on one hand, and instinctive and low risk conduct, on the other. See United States v. Draves, 103 F.3d 1328, 1337 (7th Cir.1997) (holding obstruction enhancement improper when defendant fled from the back of a patrol car during his arrest; “panicked, instinctive flight” must be distinguished from “calculated evasion”).
“[W]illfully failing to appear, as ordered, for a judicial proceeding,” see Application Note 3(e), appears not to fit readily the Fifth Circuit’s taxonomy. Such failures do not seem necessarily to have a high risk of materially impeding the criminal justice process — except in the sense of to some degree wasting judicial resources; and, depending on the breadth of “willfully,” these acts might or might not encompass spontaneous conduct. The language is, however, confined to a “judicial proceeding,” rather than reaching any neglect of any judicial order, and would not seem necessarily to encompass a judicial order to turn up for some ancillary process such as giving a handwriting sample out of court. Although courts have held that the failure to appear for a non-judicial proceeding qualifies for a § 3C1.1 sentencing enhancement, these courts also found the defendant acted in a deliberate and calculated fashion. See United States v. Defeo, 36 F.3d 272, 276 (2d Cir.1994) (upholding § 3C1.1 enhancement for four month failure to report to pretrial services because it was comparable to escape from custody); United States v. Mondello, 927 F.2d 1463, 1466-67 (9th Cir.1991) (contrasting defendant’s two-week “cat-and-mouse game of avoiding the authorities” after arrest with very different “situation where ... a criminal is surprised in the act of committing a crime and makes an evasive dodge to avoid apprehension”).
The majority’s characterization of the Fifth Circuit’s analysis seems to me incorrect. The analysis does not set actual hindrance as a threshold requirement for the enhancement, compare Maj. Op. at 772, and it does not read out the attempt language in § 3C1.1, compare Maj. Op. at 771. It requires actual hindrance only when the defendant’s act is better viewed as spontaneous than deliberate (in the sense of deliberated). Also contrary to the majority, I do not see how the Sentencing Commission’s inclusion of attempts to obstruct provides any basis for some sort of across-the-board lowering of the bar. Compare id. For example, one who attempts to escape from custody before trial deserves the enhancement, even if he is foiled by an alert guard. See Application Note 3(e). But that is no basis for diluting the requirement of actual impact expressed by the Commission in cases such as 3(g).
The majority goes some way to erase all the distinctions that the Commission sought to draw. It characterizes the Commission as having “included egregious as well as non-egregious conduct in its list of acts that warrant a sentencing enhancement,” Maj. Op. at 771, and says that the Seventh Circuit in Draves placed “the threshold higher than the Commission’s language and listings suggest,” Maj. Op. at 770. Obviously the margin between “egregious” and “non-egregious” is vague, but the Commission was plainly trying to set up a hierarchy. In Application Note 2 it stresses that “Application Note 4 sets forth examples of less serious forms of conduct to which this enhancement is not intended to apply, but that ordinarily can appropriately be sanctioned by the determination of the particular sentence within the otherwise applicable guideline range.” U.S.S.G. § 3C1.1, Application Note 2 (emphasis added). By refusing to apply § 3C1.1 to “panicked, instinctive flight”, the court in Draves was merely honoring *776the Commission’s scheme and leaving punishment of “less serious” obstructions to adjustment within the otherwise prevailing sentencing range.
Accepting the district court’s view of Maccado’s conduct as deliberate, there remains the question of the risk (or reality) that his actions would seriously impede his prosecution. In several cases courts have found a deliberate, affirmative refusal to provide a handwriting sample grounds for enhancement — in many of them the refusal was repeated. See United States v. Brazel, 102 F.3d 1120, 1163 (11th Cir.1997) (upholding enhancement where the defendant affirmatively refused to provide, and never supplied, sample); United States v. Taylor, 88 F.3d 938, 944 (11th Cir.1996) (upholding enhancement for defendant’s “repeated refusals to supply handwriting exemplars, and his effort to disguise his handwriting when he did supply them”); United States v. Ruth, 65 F.3d 599, 608 (7th Cir.1995) (upholding enhancement where the “court twice ordered handwriting exemplars, and [defendant] twice failed to comply”); United States v. Reyes, 908 F.2d 281, 290 (8th Cir.1990) (upholding enhancement where defendant refused to comply with handwriting sample order and never supplied one). Maccado’s behavior seems to have posed less risk and caused less actual impact on law enforcement. Indeed, if we exclude days in the hospital or in custody, only two days passed between the June 18, 1998 order and the actual taking of an example. Maceado seems reminiscent of the luckless Conrad Hensley in Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, though to be sure a good deal more feckless. But his hospitalization and custody may be viewed as windfalls, so that — given the deference we owe the district court’s application of law to facts, see United States v. Kim, 23 F.3d 513, 517 (D.C.Cir.1994) — we cannot reverse the district court for its implicit judgment that Maccado’s actions presented a serious risk of derailing justice.
Accordingly, I join the court in affirming the judgment.