Court Opinion

ID: 9486840
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:02:00.916966+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:57.989396
License: Public Domain

BOYCE F. MARTIN, JR., Circuit Judge,
concurring, joined by KEITH and JONES, Circuit Judges:

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

“No, I give it up, ” Alice replied: “what’s the answer?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea, ” said the Hatter.

“Nor I,” said the March Hare.

Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time, ” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

Lewis CaRROll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 93-94 (Heritage Press 1941).
Like Alice, I too grow weary trying to solve riddles that seem to have no real answers. Because Congress has chosen to strip sentencing discretion from the federal courts, however, I can see no end to the absurdity. In this case, I join Judge Siler’s excellent opinion for the majority, because I think it reaches the correct result under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). I write separately, however, to express, once again, my profound concerns about the current sentencing scheme.
Section 924(c), when applied, often leads to puzzling results. As the majority notes, a defendant who controls a firearm in conjunction with a substantial cache of a single drug will, under the government’s reading of the statute, merit a lower sentence than a defendant who possesses a firearm and inconsiderable quantities of two separate illegal substances. Supra, p. 1337. In a different time, the answer to this dilemma might well lie in *1339judicial sentencing discretion. The adoption of the Sentencing Guidelines and the enactment of mandatory minimum sentences for many drug crimes, however, forecloses such a common-sense solution. With its transfer of sentencing discretion from judges to prosecutors who control charging decisions, the current scheme seems designed to produce ever longer sentences, even though such increases may be disproportionate and unwarranted. See Department of Justice, An Analysis of Norir-Violent Drug Offenders With Minimal Criminal Histories (1994) (noting that under current system “low-level,” first-time drug offenders, who are least likely to commit crimes after release, often get sentences that “overlap with defendants who had much more significant roles in the drug scheme”).
Because judicial discretion is no longer the answer to this conundrum, this Court is forced to attempt to divine congressional intent with regard to Johnson’s situation. As the numerous separate opinions in this case well demonstrate, however, Section 924(c) is subject to widely divergent interpretation. Given the disparate results often produced by the statute’s application, I certainly cannot fault my colleagues for reaching varying conclusions regarding congressional intent. Instead, I am left with the firm conviction that Congress — by establishing the Guideline system and enacting mandatory minimum sentences in statutes like Section 924(c)— presents us with a riddle to which there may be no true answer.
RALPH B. GUY, JR., Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Although I concur in the result reached in this case, I do so on the basis of the specific facts presented. I am not willing to say that the simultaneous possession of different drugs and even one firearm under different circumstances may not properly result in multiple convictions and sentences under 18 U.S.C. § 924(e). In the case we are deciding, neither the firearms nor the drugs were found on the person of the defendant. They were found in the bedroom of the home that the defendant was occupying. Although we do not discuss it in this opinion, the “in relation to” element of the § 924(c) count is met by applying the fortress theory relative to the firearms. In other words, the defendant possessed firearms in the house to protect and otherwise facilitate the possession of all his drugs. It is unrealistic, as the government did, to try to connect one firearm to one particular drug.
If, however, a drug dealer is standing on a street corner and selling heroin to heroin customers out of one pocket and then selling cocaine to cocaine customers out of another pocket while openly displaying a firearm, I believe that a separate 924(e) charge could attach to a heroin sale and then attach to a cocaine sale, notwithstanding that the drug vendor possessed simultaneously the two different narcotic substances and the firearm.
Applying the logic of the case at bar, if our vendor had been arrested merely in possession of the cocaine, heroin, and firearm, then the reasoning of this decision would apply and he would be chargeable with only one § 924(c) count. In short, I just want to make sure that our language relative to the simultaneous possession of drugs and firearms is not inadvertently extended beyond the facts of this case at this time.