Court Opinion

ID: 9483512
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:22:42.204886+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:39.988887
License: Public Domain

WILKINSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I agree that Jones’ 1978 New York conviction must be counted for federal sentencing purposes and that Jones must be sentenced as a career offender.
The reason for my view is simple. I do not believe that a federal sentencing proceeding is at all an appropriate forum for reviewing the constitutionality of a defendant’s prior state convictions. I expressed this view in a dissenting opinion to Jones I, see 907 F.2d at 470-84. Nonetheless, with respect to sentencing proceedings which took place prior to November 1, 1990, I must concede that Jones I is the law of the circuit, as that decision has now been amplified in Jones II.1
The amplification of Jones I in the instant case is important. The majority has now made clear that district courts can decline to entertain challenges by a defendant to his prior state convictions. In addition, the majority has taken pains to point out the obvious difficulties, from the standpoint of both comity and practicality, of reviewing constitutional challenges to state convictions in a federal sentencing proceeding.
I welcome this clarification. It is no secret that the Sentencing Guidelines, for all their virtues, have imposed a significant burden upon our district judges. To require those judges to entertain first-instance challenges to prior state convictions, or to conduct evidentiary hearings upon the same, would make the administration of the Guidelines very nearly impossible. It *112would also diminish the role of the states in our federal system by permitting defendants to challenge state convictions in proceedings where the state is not even a party and where state remedies with respect to the conviction have never been pursued.
I am pleased that the majority acknowledges these significant problems. Under the ground rules laid down by the majority, I suspect that it will be the unusual case in which a challenge to a presumptively valid state conviction is entertained in a Guidelines sentencing proceeding. Most of the challenges to state convictions that routinely come before us — claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, of incriminating statements taken involuntarily, of unlawful line-ups or show-ups, of bias in the selection of the jury, of prosecutorial failure to disclose potentially exculpatory information, of impermissible curtailment of cross-examination, of involuntary pleas of guilty, and, of course, of insufficiency of the evidence when the case does go to trial— would require a significant expenditure of judicial resources to resolve, especially if there are no state proceedings and findings to which a federal court can defer. These claims will only rarely be amenable to first-instance resolution on the basis of indisputable documentary proof. Moreover, even if meritorious, such claims are almost invariably subject to some form of harmless error inquiry, which requires careful attention to the details of the trial record and which commends these claims for resolution in state court.
Thus, in the typical case, a district court will be well within its discretion (and within the Jones II guidelines) to respect the state interest in the finality of presumptively valid state convictions and to require that any challenges to such convictions in federal court come through the customary channels of collateral attack. See United States v. French, 974 F.2d 687, 701 (6th Cir.1992) (underscoring the importance of federalism and finality in this context); United States v. Canales, 960 F.2d 1311, 1316 (5th Cir.1992) (emphasizing the importance of comity, “especially where the challenged conviction is by a state court”). Here, of course, the district court abused its discretion in failing to follow this course.2 In vacating the sentence of the trial judge, this court has sent a salutary signal that challenges to state convictions in Guidelines sentencing proceedings face tall obstacles. It is a signal that I earnestly hope will be heeded.

. I agree with the majority that the holding in this case is limited. The parties have not put at issue the question of whether the 1990 amendment to Application Note 6 affects the holding in Jones I, nor whether the amendment is retroactive. I thus reserve comment upon that question.

. That Jones may no longer have available a § 2254 attack on his 1978 New York conviction is not material. As the court notes, he had the opportunity to contest the constitutionality of his conviction — ordinarily "a failure to have made the attempt will bespeak a recognized lack of basis for doing so, thus raising in question the basis now claimed for making the attempt in an even more attenuated collateral setting.”