Court Opinion

ID: 9836840
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-02 03:15:12.65835+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:45:19.040517
License: Public Domain

GIERKE, Judge
(dissenting):
With the greatest respect for my colleagues in the majority, I fear that they have substituted their judgement for the court below, under the guise of finding an abuse of discretion. They have engaged in assessment of sentence appropriateness, a function within the exclusive province of the Court of Criminal Appeals, opining that the sentence was “all out of proportion to his offenses.” See United States v. Jones, 39 MJ 315, 317 (CMA 1994). Finally, they have speculated, with no basis in the record, that the court below found itself in a “no-win situation.” 53 *141MJ at 134. For all these reasons, I must dissent.
The court below concluded that the court-martial would have imposed a bad-conduct discharge even if appellant had not been convicted of an aggravated assault by kicking his ex-wife. The kicking was alleged to have occurred during a brawl between appellant’s ex-wife and his paramour, with whom he had entered into a bigamous marriage. The court below reassessed the sentence, specifically citing United States v. Sales, 22 MJ 305 (CMA 1986), cut the period of confinement adjudged in half, and affirmed the bad-conduct discharge. Sales permits a Court of Criminal Appeals to reassess and affirm a sentence if it can be reasonably certain that the court-martial would have imposed a sentence of at least a certain level in the absence of the error at trial. 22 MJ at 308. The court below determined that appellant would have received a bad-conduct discharge even if he had not been convicted of kicking his ex-wife. My colleagues have concluded that affirming the bad-conduct discharge was an abuse of discretion.
Abuse of discretion means that the court below has a range of choice and will not be reversed as long as it stays within that range. See Kern v. TXO Production Corp., 738 F.2d 968, 971 (8th Cir.1984); United States v. Wallace, 964 F.2d 1214, 1217 n. 3 (D.C.Cir.1992). Our duty is to ask “whether the decision [of the court below] is legal in the sense of being within the prescribed boundaries which define the area of discretion.” United States v. Siroky, 44 MJ 394, 398 n. 1 (1996). In the area of sentence reassessment, the area of discretion enjoyed by a Court of Criminal Appeals is very broad. The legal test on appeal is whether the sentence reassessed by the Court of Criminal Appeals is “no greater than that which would have been imposed if the prejudicial error had not been committed.” United States v. Poole, 26 MJ 272, 274 (CMA 1988).* We will overturn that court’s decision only “to prevent obvious miscarriages of justice or abuses of discretion.” United States v. Davis, 48 MJ 494, 495 (1998), quoting Jones, 39 MJ at 317.
The evidence before the court-martial showed that appellant was near retirement, but that his conduct during the preceding 2 years had been less than stellar. In December of 1993, slightly more than 2 years before his court-martial, appellant was convicted in a civilian court of assaulting his wife and injuring her to the extent that she required hospitalization. The court-martial was aware that appellant was administratively reduced in rank because of his civilian conviction. The court-martial was aware that appellant became sexually involved with another woman, that he deceived that woman into believing that he was divorced, that he entered into a bigamous marriage with that woman in December of 1994.
The court-martial was aware that, after appellant was charged with adultery, bigamy, sodomy, and aggravated assault, he prepared a false statement for his ex-wife to sign. He applied for a marriage license with his ex-wife, in order to deceive his ex-wife into believing that he intended to remarry her, and to convince her to testify falsely at his court-martial.
Under these facts, the allegation that appellant kicked his ex-wife while she was engaged in a brawl with his paramour was an insignificant piece of appellant’s pattern of deceit, deception, and efforts to pervert the criminal justice process. The court below applied the Sales test and found that appellant’s offenses and disciplinary record made it reasonably certain that the court-martial would have imposed a bad-conduct discharge, even if appellant had not been convicted of kicking his ex-wife. Under these facts, I see no obvious miscarriage of justice and no abuse of discretion.

 The majority relies in part on the decision of the convening authority to refer the charges to a special court-martial. In my view, what the convening authority did or would have done is irrelevant and is not part of sentence reassessment. The only question is what the court-martial would have done in the absence of the error.