Court Opinion

ID: 9486020
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:36:05.322992+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:29.685575
License: Public Domain

BRIGHT, Senior Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I dissent and would affirm the sentence imposed by the district court.
The sentencing judge imposed a forty-five-year sentence for Thornbrugh’s three firearms convictions using the same interpretation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) later adopted by the Supreme Court in Deal v. United States, — U.S. --, 113 S.Ct. 1993, 124 L.Ed.2d 44 (1993). Instead of adding 262-327 months, however, as specified by the sentencing guidelines, the sentencing judge added three *1475months for the three robbery convictions. Thus, Thornbrugh initially received a prison term of forty-five years and three months.
Following Deal, the majority is now constrained to hold that for the forty-year-old Thornbrugh, a sentence of just over forty-five years is not in compliance with existing law. Combining the guidelines’ requirement with the § 924(c) firearms enhancement, the district court on remand must impose a minimum total sentence of almost sixty-seven years. With all due respect to the Sentencing Commission’s general rule that the underlying crime sentence should be added to the mandatory time for carrying a firearm under § 924(c)(1), I doubt that the Sentencing Commission ever envisioned the kind of unfair and irrational application of combined sentencing which the majority believes is required here.
The majority asserts that the Sentencing Commission “obviously considered the fact that a defendant would be subject to punishment under § 924(c) in addition to the sentence for the underlying crime.” Op. at 1474. The applicable Sentencing Commission guidelines and commentary, however, were promulgated prior to the Supreme Court’s Deal opinion. The Commission therefore had no opportunity to consider the effect of combining the sentencing guidelines with § 924(c) in cases like Thornbrugh’s where a defendant is convicted for the first time of multiple firearms violations under § 924(c).
In my view, the district court’s downward departure lent some practicality to the sentence. By adding only three months to the mandated statutory sentence, the sentencing judge attempted to avoid punishment far in excess of the defendant’s projected lifespan of thirty-five more years. The judge recognized that enough is about enough in the forty-five-year mandatory sentence for the gun violations.
The majority decision ignores what is truly obvious — that the portion of a sentence which goes beyond the defendant’s lifespan can serve no retributive, deterrent, rehabilitative or any other proper function of a prison sentence. In this case, the judiciary wastes its scarce resources when it spends its judicial time remanding a case to the district court for a sentence computation that has no practical effect — namely, how many more years beyond Thornbrugh’s probable life expectancy must he be sentenced to serve.
Even the majority recognizes that remanding for an additional sentence amounts to an exercise in futility. Op. at 1474. Nonetheless, the majority believes its options are circumscribed by Deal and by the Commission’s commentary which cross-references the sentencing guidelines and § 924(c). Op. at 1474. See U.S.S.G. §§ 2B3.1, 2K2.4. If the majority is correct, both this ease and Deal demonstrate that guideline sentencing, as well as mandatory sentencing, has created a sentencing regime that is cruel, unfair, impractical, expensive, and badly in need of reform.
In a recent sentencing publication, summarizing the views of twenty-five judges, fourteen lawyers and probation officers and five academics, the editors conclude:
The federal guideline experiment is not working well. Substantial change is needed. Congress and the President should act wisely and soon.
Marc Miller & Daniel J. Freed, Suggestions for the President and the lOSrd Congress on the Guideline Sentencing System, 5 Fed. Sent.R. 187 (Jan./Feb. 1993).
Additionally, in a separate article in that publication, William W. Wilkins, Jr., Chairman of the United States Sentencing Commission and Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, states that criminal sentences can become skewed by mandatory minimums:
The sentences these statutes mandate are philosophically at odds with the notion of guideline sentencing and have the tendency to skew punishment levels by sometimes producing unwarranted uniformity. On the other hand, they often apply on a hit or miss basis, depending on how prose-cutorial charging discretion is exercised. The Commission is on record opposing mandatory minimum statutes.
Id. at 201.
Finally, I endorse the view expressed in United States v. Abreu, 962 F.2d 1447 (10th *1476Cir.1992) (en banc), cert. granted and judgment vacated, — U.S. -, 113 S.Ct. 2405, 124 L.Ed.2d 630 (1993), that § 924(c)(1) does not require pyramid-layered sentencing. Notably, before Deal, seven judges of this court held that because Thornbrugh was not a recidivist, section 924(c) did not require a forty-five-year firearm sentence. Abreu, 962 F.2d at 1452.
The Deal Court rejected the common sense approach to the firearms statute advocated by this court in Abreu (and by the Deal dissenters). The Supreme Court’s decision in Deal is now the law of the land. But the last word of the Court still does not make that decision right, even though this court must follow that decision. I endorse Justice Stevens’ dissenting view which rejects the 105-year sentence imposed in Deal upon a defendant who robbed six banks with a gun but had never suffered a prior firearms conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1). Among other things, Justice Stevens observed:
‘[Pjunishing first offenders with twenty-five-year sentences does not deter crime as much as it ruins lives. If, after arrest and conviction, a first offender is warned that he will face a mandatory twenty-year sentence if he commits the same crime again, then the offender will know of the penalty. Having already served at least five years in prison, he will have a strong incentive to stay out of trouble. Discouraging recidivism by people who have already been in prison and been released serves a far more valuable purpose than deterring offenders who have yet to be arrested and have no knowledge of the law’s penalties.’
Deal v. United States, — U.S. at -- n. 10, 113 S.Ct. at 2003-04 n. 10 (Stevens, J., dissenting) (quoting United States v. Jones, 965 F.2d 1507, 1521 (8th Cir.1992), cert. denied, —— U.S. -, -, -, 113 S.Ct. 346, 439, 2418, 121 L.Ed.2d 261, 358, 640 (1993)).
I see no point in remanding this case to the district court to add more years to an already excessive and, I suggest, irrational sentence.