Court Opinion

ID: 9499518
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:50:38.980804+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:31.324145
License: Public Domain

FERNANDEZ, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in Judge Reinhardt’s opinion. I write separately for two reasons.
First, I am not satisfied that there was no reason to continue to hold Irons in prison other than the circumstances of his callously senseless murder of another person for trivial reasons. While his answer to whether he still had the rage that led him to kill someone1 can easily be read in an innocuous manner, it need not be, and the Commission could interpret it to mean that he might. At any rate, I see nothing wrong with being very, very cautious about releasing a person from prison and onto *671society when he has committed the kind of crime that Irons committed and has done it as flagitiously as he did it. The Board has a right (nay, an obligation) to be exceedingly cautious about setting him free.
Second, Judge Noonan has issued a concurring opinion in which he decries the fact that we (and, probably, the United States Supreme Court) have deemed the AEDPA to be constitutional. I do not join that, and its mere filing would elicit no response from me but for the fact that Judge Reinhardt has concurred in the concurrence. Because that means that two members of the panel have joined that opinion, it might be seen to indicate that the panel is speaking for the court and that the court is, therefore, attacking itself. It might be thought that we have found a new way to create an umbrageous, or stealth, conflict in our jurisprudence, which district courts and attorneys had better take into account. That, I know, is not the intention of my colleagues, who have carefully crafted the concurring opinion to indicate that, at least at this point, they merely wish to express their strongly-held views about the strictures of the AEDPA, without creating a conflict in the law of this circuit.
Thus, I respectfully concur in Judge Reinhardt’s opinion only.

. The testimony went this way, in part:
Attorney Schmidt [Irons' attorney]: You gave the impression, in response to one of the questions, almost that if it wasn’t Mr. Nicholson [the victim], that it might have been somebody else
Inmate Irons: Looking back on it, after the fact, I — now, I guess that those two questions relate to each other. Looking back, I realize that I was responsible. And in that sense, it could have been somebody else. I mean, I don't mean I was going to kill somebody at random, but the circumstances — some set of circumstances that led me to that rage, I was primed for it. I was — I had let myself become that person who could kill and it could have been somebody else....
Attorney Schmidt: Do you have any of that rage now?
Inmate Irons: I don’t think so. I try to make a real effort to examine my motives, to look inside of myself.... I — I think I've dealt with most of these issues. If they arise in some other way, I’ll look for the appropriate help.