Court Opinion

ID: 9843065
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:25:33.539579+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:14:27.182639
License: Public Domain

*1108HEANEY, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring, joined by Chief Judge ARNOLD.
I concur in the court’s opinion. I write separately only to note that Gordon’s 262-month sentence exemplifies what is wrong with the career offender provisions passed by Congress and implemented by the Sentencing Commission. In my view, the career offender provisions, like mandatory minimum sentences, “create penalties so distorted as to hamper federal criminal adjudication.” Federal Courts Study Committee, Judicial Conference of the United States, Report of the Federal Courts Study Committee 134 (1990) (discussing mandatory minimum penalties).
At first blush, the career offender provisions appear to be sensible, neutral, and fair. They require that a court answer two simple questions: (1) has this offender previously been convicted of two felonies involving drugs or violence; and (2) is the instant offense a felony that is a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense. Once both questions are answered “yes,” the offender is denominated a “career offender” and is subject to a real-time prison sentence at or near the statutory maximum. What could be more fair and equal?
As one commentator has noted, however, treating too many unlike cases as if they are alike will violate rather than promote the principle of equality. Albert W. Al-schuler, The Failure of Sentencing Guidelines: A Plea for Less Aggregation, 58 U.Chi.L.Rev. 901, 916 (1991). I believe this to be a chronic problem with the current guidelines system, and it certainly is aggravated by the mandatory minimum sentences and the career offender provisions.
Like the mandatory minimums, the career offender provisions direct the court to ignore many relevant facts about the offender and the crime and to fix the offender’s sentence based on only one or two “facts.” Cf. United States Sentencing Commission, Special Report to the Congress: Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System, 26 (1991) (criticizing mandatory minimum sentences, which focus on one indicator of offense seriousness and perhaps one indicator of criminal history, for ignoring offense and offender characteristics and causing similar sentences in widely divergent cases). Thus, as long as two prior offenses fit into the categories set forth in section 4B1.1, the prior offenses are counted. The career offender provisions do not consider the defendant’s role in the prior offenses, the defendant’s age at the time he committed the offenses, the number of years that have elapsed since his prior criminal conduct, or the relative severity of the prior offenses. I acknowledge that any drug or violent felony conviction is a serious matter, but to treat all prior convictions the same is to ignore the fact that some are more serious than others.
Similarly, the career offender provisions direct the court to disregard what actually happened in the current offense. The court can make the most careful findings of fact about the proper offense level and the defendant’s current criminal history score, but these are irrelevant if the guidelines range called for by the current offense is lower than that called for by the career offender provisions. This is in direct conflict with one goal of the guidelines, which is to individualize punishment in light of case-specific offense characteristics.
In the present case, the career offender provisions pushed Gordon’s criminal history category from IV to VI because Gordon had two prior felony drug convictions from 1980 and 1982. Gordon’s 1980 conviction involved marijuana manufacturing and trafficking, while his 1982 conviction involved only marijuana trafficking. Two of Gordon’s five co-defendants in the 1980 cases were his father and his older brother (Gordon was 24 at the time). The record does not reveal Gordon’s role in the 1980 offenses, the amount of marijuana involved in either the 1980 or 1982 offenses, or the nature of those offenses. Under the career offender provisions, however, such relevant facts are of no importance. The only thing that matters is the existence of the two prior offenses. To focus only on the existence of prior convictions without looking into what actually happened years ago, however, results in irrational and unjust sentences.
*1109Had the career offender provisions not been in effect, Gordon’s offense level for the current offense would have been somewhere between 12 and 28, depending on the amount of drugs for which the district court held Gordon responsible. Indeed, the district court indicated that it thought Gordon was not a leader, and suggested that there was only a small amount of drugs manufactured. With a criminal history category of IV, Gordon’s guidelines sentence could have been as low as 21 months, or as high as 137 months. Any of these guidelines sentences would reflect better the seriousness of the offense and Ronald Gordon’s circumstances than the 262-month sentence required by the career offender guideline. The district court was troubled by what it saw as an excessive sentence, and so am I, but unfortunately Harmelin requires us to affirm.