Court Opinion

ID: 9497749
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:59:10.559982+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:23.797595
License: Public Domain

GWIN, District Judge
concurring.
I concur in the Court’s opinion, but I write separately to speak to additional considerations.
In addition to the majority’s reasons offered for remand, two additional considerations warrant remand. First, 18 U.S.C. § 3742(f)(1) bolsters our decision to remand Barnett’s case for resentencing. This statute instructs when the court of appeals shall remand for error in applying the Guidelines. Section 3742(f)(1) states: “If the court of appeals determines that ... the sentence was imposed in violation of law or imposed as a result of an incorrect application of the sentencing guidelines, the court shall remand the case for further sentencing proceedings with such instructions as the court considers appropriate.” 18 U.S.C. § 3742(f)(1) (emphasis added). Section 3742(f)(1) survives Booker,1 and it suggests that remand for resen-tencing is appropriate when the district court errs in applying the Guidelines. The Supreme Court has construed Section 3742(f)(1) concerning the circumstances for remanding for resentencing. See Williams v. United States, 503 U.S. 193, 203, 112 S.Ct. 1112, 117 L.Ed.2d 341 (1992).
In Williams, the Supreme Court stated that “remand is required only if the sentence was imposed as a result of an incorrect application of the Guidelines.” Id. at 202-03, 112 S.Ct. 1112 (internal quotation marks and emphasis omitted). Although the cases after Williams arose in the context of harmless error and not plain error, we interpreted the Supreme Court’s decision in' Williams as establishing that “remand [is] appropriate ... unless [the] party defending [the] sentence convinces [the] court that [the] district court would have imposed [the] same sentence absent misapplication of guideline.” United States v. Parrott, 148 F.3d 629, 636 (6th Cir.1998); see also United States v. Vandeberg, 201 F.3d 805, 812 (6th Cir.2000) (“Remand is appropriate unless the appellate court is convinced that the trial court would have imposed the same sentence absent [its] misinterpretation of the guideline.”) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Because o.f the posture of Barnett’s appeal, the cases interpreting Section 3742(f)(1) are more persuasive. Barnett was sentenced before the Supreme Court’s decisions in.Blakely and Booker. At the time Barnett was sentenced, all controlling authority suggested that any challenge to the mandatory application of the Guidelines would fail. Not surprisingly, Barnett’s counsel raised no argument that the mandatory application of the Guidelines was error.
The district court found Barnett to be an armed career criminal under 18 U.S.C. § 924(e). The Guidelines caused Barnett’s base offense level to be set at 33 based upon criminal history, U.S.S.G. § 4B1.4. Without his criminal history, Barnett’s offense level, after adjustments, was 28. As the majority points out, this finding of *532criminal history did not implicate the Sixth Amendment even though it had a major impact upon the sentence that Barnett faced. Because the Sixth Amendment was not involved, Barnett had no reason to object under Apprendi. Finally, the record shows that the district judge felt constrained by the Guidelines, which required her to sentence within offense level 33. While the record is sparse on the district judge’s reasons for imposing the sentence of 265 months, the record does show that the district judge selected offense level 33 solely because of the mandatory nature of the Guidelines.
Cases interpreting Section 3742(f)(1) further suggest that remand is appropriate. In remanding one case, we observed, “Hence, there is a possibility that the district court’s ultimate conclusion was influenced by its misunderstanding of its sentencing options.” United States v. Schray, 383 F.3d 430, 434 (6th Cir.2004) (remanding and concluding no harmless error); accord Kelly v. United States, 29 F.3d 1107, 1111 (7th Cir.1994) (“But absent an express statement that the court would impose the same sentence even if a different range were applicable, it is difficult to imagine a case in which an appeals court could declare with the requisite degree of confidence that the application of an incorrect range would amount to harmless error.”), overruled on other grounds, United States v. Ceballos, 302 F.3d 679, 690-91 (7th Cir.2002).
Given the substantial change in the law after Booker, we see no reason to depart from these precedents here.
Second, we consider this case in light of one of the underlying purposes of the plain error doctrine: the economy of judicial resources. In summary, an unnecessarily restrictive plain error analysis will result in substantial additional work for this court and will save the district courts almost no time. Moreover, a restrictive plain error rule would result in the unseemly result of defendants being sentenced under rules that were not valid and without any notice that the rules were not valid. Given the minimal time needed to allow the district court to sentence Barnett under the correct standard, I would remand this matter for re-sentencing.
The efficient administration of justice is one of the underlying purposes of the plain error doctrine. The plain-error analysis promotes the efficient administration of justice in two regards. First, the rule allows consideration of some errors despite no trial objection. By considering certain errors without objection, the rule avoids incessant trial objections, objections made solely to preserve an issue upon the possibility that there may be an intervening change in the law. As the Supreme Court has found, a rule that never considered errors unless there had been a trial objection “would result in counsel’s inevitably making a long and virtually useless laundry list of objections to rulings that were plainly supported by existing precedent.” Johnson v. United States, 520 U.S. 461, 468, 117 S.Ct. 1544, 137 L.Ed.2d 718 (1997). Second, if every error resulted in reversal, trial courts would spend inordinate amounts of time re-trying cases that involved insubstantial errors.
Endeavoring to avoid both these inefficiencies, the plain-error rule limits errors that result in remand to those that involve substantial rights and a showing that a defendant has been prejudiced. As the Seventh Circuit has stated, “The plain-error standard, which applies when a district court has not been given the first opportunity to correct alleged mistakes, strikes a balance among the proper functioning of the adversary system, efficiency in managing litigation, and the demands of justice.” United States v. Wilson, 237 *533F.3d 827, 836 (7th Cir.2001) (emphasis added), cert. denied, 534 U.S. 840, 122 S.Ct. 97 (2001). In the posture that we now find ourselves after the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. -, 125 S.Ct. 738, 160 L.Ed.2d 621 (2005), I believe it more efficient to remand this case to the district court for re-sentencing. Otherwise, we adopt a rule that results in an inordinate expenditure of appellate court resources, yet saves the district court little.
The fourth prong of the plain error analysis directs attention to whether unraised errors “seriously affect the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings,” and gives the court discretion in determining whether to remand a case to the trial court. Among the concerns that appellate courts take into account, not least is a concern for judicial economy.2 Indeed, many courts decline to remand where a new trial would expend an unnecessary amount of judicial resources. See, e.g., United States v. Cedelle, 89 F.3d 181, 186 (4th Cir.1996) (under the circumstances, “to expend the judicial resources necessary for a retrial would be more detrimental to the fairness, integrity, and public reputation of judicial proceedings than permitting [Appellants’] convictions to stand”); United States v. Ross, 77 F.3d 1525 (7th Cir.1996) (finding the first three factors of the plain error test met but determining that “it would be an unnecessary waste of judicial resources to retry this case” based on the error at hand); United States v. Izaguirre-Losoya, 219 F.3d 437, 442 (5th Cir.2000) (finding, under the. circumstances, that to remand would be “an empty formality and waste of judicial resources”).
Notably, in the cases cited above, appellate courts declined to remand, because to retry a case would be to expend a great amount of resources. By contrast, where a re-sentencing is at issue, the costs are far less.See, e.g., Charles A. Wright, Federal Practice and Procedure § 856, at 511-12 (2004) (“Some have suggested that errors in sentencing, unraised below, should be reviewed with a less deferential standard as the costs of re-sentencing are lower than the costs of retrial.”). In this vein, we note the Second Circuit case of United States v. Sofsky, 287 F.3d 122 (2d Cir.2002). In Sofsky, the Second Circuit stated that, because remanding would not precipitate a new trial but, rather, a re-sentencing, “it appears that in the sentencing context there are circumstances that permit us to relax the otherwise rigorous standards of plain error review to correct sentencing errors.” Id. at 125.
Having presided over hundreds, if not thousands, of sentencings, I believe the time devoted to post-B.ooker re-sentencing would be small. Since the 1940s, district court judges have submitted monthly reports that generally detail the time they expend on various court functions, the JS-10 report. These reports for the Northern District of Ohio indicate that the amount of time spent on sentencing before Booker averaged less than 45 minutes.3 Sentencing on remand would be significantly less.
At resentencing, the sentencing court is already familiar with the pre-sentence re*534port. Given earlier opportunities to present evidence on disputed guideline calculations, there would be no need to reopen the case for hearing on those issues. The re-sentencing hearing would simply allow the trial court to apply the proper standard, typically with only limited input from the defendant.
In contrast, the time spent by each court of appeals panel required to analyze the application of plain error, would be multiples greater. And the result of this expenditure of judicial resources would be that a defendant was sentenced using a standard that was clearly wrong.
I do not suggest that plain errors in sentencing should always be subject to less rigorous review. I do suggest that in the situation in which we here find ourselves, it is appropriate to consider judicial resources. Here, as the Court lays out in its opinion, the first three prongs of the plain error test are met. Further, the “fairness, integrity, and reputation of judicial proceedings” are very much at stake — defendants with active cases on appeal were sentenced under the wrong rules.
Guessing at what a district judge would have done had she known the greater discretion afforded by Booker affects the public reputation of judicial proceedings. Rather than attempt to predict what a district court would have done, we should follow the more efficient path — we should remand this matter to the district court. As Williams v. United States reiterated: “it is not the role of an appellate court to substitute its judgment for that of the sentencing court as to the appropriateness of a particular sentence.” 503 U.S. 193, 205, 112 S.Ct. 1112, 117 L.Ed.2d 341 (1992) (citations omitted).

. In Booker, the Supreme Court excised 18 U.S.C. § 3742(e), which governed our standard of review.

. We may consider judicial resources when applying the fourth prong of the plain error test. This analysis does not affect the third prong, which concerns whether the error "affects the substantial rights” of the defendant.

. The JS-10 report may overstate the time used for sentencing. The minimum time increment is one-half hour. Even using this minimum time increment, in the three month period between November 2004 to January 2005, Northern District of Ohio judges sentenced 222 defendants and averaged less than 45 minutes per sentencing hearing.