Court Opinion

ID: 9459912
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:35:19.184745+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:23.625810
License: Public Domain

LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part:
I join in affirming the conviction, but believe the trial judge erred in concluding that a five-year minimum sentence was mandatory.
The issue concerns the construction of Section 205 of the District of Columbia Court Reform Act, passed July 29, 1970, 22 D.C.Code § 3202(a) (Supp. V, 1972). In subsection (a)(1) Congress provided severe exposure, up to life imprisonment for a person who “commits a crime of violence in the District of Columbia when armed.” In subsection (a)(2) Congress provided that any such person “shall, if he is convicted more than once of having so committed a crime of violence in the District of Columbia,” be sentenced to a minimum of five years.
In my view the provision in § 205(a)(2) should not be held to require a mandatory minimum five year sentence for a person whose prior crime of violence was committed prior to the passage of this provision. A statute normally is interpreted' to operate prospectively. The words “if he is convicted more than once” do not have a retroactive ring.1
There is undoubted need for severe sentencing power for persons who commit crimes of violence. Such maximum sentences buttress deterrent policy. But when a legislature is mandating compulsory sentences, it must, in my view, be entirely explicit in the terms of the law. The broad assumptions of legislative intent that are not particularized in detail run the risk of sentences which, by their rigidity, can do more to hurt society than to help it.
The Government admitted that its view of the sound construction of this statute leads to this result: Take a young person who commits one armed crime of violence before the 1970 Act was passed, and another after the Act was passed. He is subsequently tried for the first offense, given Youth Corrections Act disposition, and is set on a sound road during and as a result of the Youth Corrections Act treatment. Nevertheless, he must be given a five-year mandatory minimum for the crime committed prior to the opportunity given him for Youth Correction Act treatment, so that the rehabilitative work which is so necessary to break the vicious cycles of crime and recidivism would be undone.
I do not minimize the deterrent values of sentences. This has particular meaning as to maximum sentence. As to *1018mandatory minimum sentences, deterrence implies notice. Where the first offense was committed prior to enactment of the statute, the deterrent and notice effects of the provision as to the consequence of future misconduct was at best severely attenuated. 2
The law indulges a presumption that the passage of the Act with this provision gave legal notice to all of all of its provisions. All laws must have such a presumption that is conclusive as a matter of law, for no one can stop the effect of a new law on the ground that he has not heard it. That presumption was applied in the early part of the 19th century even when communications did not permit a resident of Boston to learn for some days of a law that had been passed in Washington. But here we are concerned with criminal statutes, subject to the doctrine of lenity when there is ambiguity. I would vacate the sentence and remand for resentencing.

. They clo not have the same retroactive quality as the provisions in § 201 of the 1970 act, which provides for increase in maximum punishment, in these circumstances: Under § 201(a), 22 D.C.Code § 104, “if any person (1) is convicted of a criminal offense . . . and (2) was previously convicted of a criminal offense . . . which offense, at the time of the conviction referred to in paragraph (1) is the same as, constitutes, or necessarily includes, the offense referred to in that paragraph.”
Under § 2.01(b), 22 D.C.Code § 104a, “if any person (A) is convicted in the District of Columbia of a felony, and (B) before the commission of such felony, was convicted of at least two felonies. . . . ”

. The precise point is not before us, but I would be inclined to think that § 205’s mandatory minimum only operates when the seeond offense is committed subsequent to a conviction for the prior offense.