Court Opinion

ID: 9482915
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:04:53.017559+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:15.985261
License: Public Domain

EDITH H. JONES, Circuit Judge,
concurring specially:
Because I believe it is possible, although not necessarily wise, to reconcile the district court’s sentencing procedure in this case with our Lopez1-Harvey2 line of cases, I concur in the result reached by Judge Garza’s opinion. As will be seen, I also agree with much of Judge Wisdom’s analysis and would urge the court to consider this issue en banc.
A couple of additional facts bolster my decision. First, while Lambert’s pre-sen-tence report calculated a criminal history category of V with a corresponding suggested imprisonment range of 12 to 18 months, the sentencing range for a defen*719dant with a criminal history category VI would have elevated the maximum sentence to only 21 months. The statutory maximum, on the other hand, is five years, and the district court imposed a sentence of 36 months. Measured against the statutory maximum and the patent inadequacy of the sentence under a criminal history category V, as the district court specifically recognized, Lambert’s 36-month sentence does not seem improper. My colleagues do not disagree on the reasonableness of the ultimate sentence.
The point Judge Wisdom’s dissent powerfully asserts is that § 4A1.3 required the district court to articulate additional reasons why Category VI would have been inadequate here. But it is not clear to me that the Commentary to the Guidelines requires the step-by-step process in a case like this. I think there is a common-sense reason for the rule stated in Harvey, that a district court’s articulation of its departure need not necessarily proceed step-by-step when the defendant is already at a high criminal history category. When the history is Category V, as here, the district court has only two possible upward departures. Those are specified in Category VI and above to the statutory limit. When the defendant’s previous criminal record indicates not only violent crimes but a propensity to return to crime every time he got out of the penal system, it is obvious beyond peradventure that elevating him to a criminal history category that would at most increase his incarceration by three months is inadequate. We can see this inadequacy, the district court could see this inadequacy, and I think it elevates the intricacy of the Guidelines beyond all reason to require a remand when the sentence will not change and all we are requiring the district court to do is to state the obvious.
However, I agree with Judge Wisdom that the Supreme Court’s recent Williams decision implies a more hypertechnical review of departure sentences than we have sanctioned in cases like Perez.3 I also agree that Williams requires district courts to employ Guideline commentary seriously. But I think both those approaches can be reconciled with our Lopez-Harvey rules in the following way. When a criminal history category is low, the step-by-step analysis is appropriate because there are a number of intermediate sentencing decisions that the district court might make. Section 4A1.3 tells the district courts to make these intermediate decisions systematically. Where, however, we are at history Category V, as I said before, there are only two upward possibilities. In this case, at least, the district court’s preference for a sentence above Category VI is so plainly understood as to easily permit appellate review and to satisfy the rationale of § 4A1.3.
Under these narrow circumstances, I do not believe that the district court misapplied § 4A1.3, as Judge Wisdom contends. On the other hand, because our court’s jurisprudence construing § 4A1.3 is very difficult to interpret, and because it may well conflict with decisions from most other circuits, I believe we should consider the standard for evaluating departures based on criminal history en banc. I urge the court to do so.

. United States v. Lopez, 871 F.2d 513 (5th Cir.1989).

. United States v. Harvey, 897 F.2d 1300, 1306 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, — U.S. —, 111 S.Ct. 568, 112 L.Ed.2d 574 (1990).

. United States v. Perez, 915 F.2d 947, 948 (5th Cir.1990).