Court Opinion

ID: 9481479
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:20:08.916153+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:20.433985
License: Public Domain

ROSENN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. Although the majority’s refusal to permit a downward departure from the strict career offender provision is understandable, I remain unconvinced that the sentencing judge’s imposition on Shoupe of a sentence of over seven years for selling less than one-half ounce of cocaine was unduly lenient and prohibited by the sentencing guidelines.
The majority’s decision requires Shoupe to serve a prison sentence of over fourteen years. The majority reaches its result because Shoupe, over fifteen years ago at the age of eighteen, was convicted of burglary and armed robbery and in 1984 was convicted of distributing one-eighth of an ounce of cocaine and one-seventh of an ounce of marijuana. This criminal history qualifies Shoupe for designation as a “career offender” under the guidelines. U.S. *122S.G. § 4B1.1. Reading very little judicial discretion in this guideline section, the majority rejects each attempt made by the sentencing judge to justify a downward departure from the harsh dictate of Shoupe’s career offender score.
The majority concludes that the reasons for departure cited by the sentencing court did not constitute a “mitigating circumstance” under this court’s general approach to determining the permissibility of departures. The majority, however, does not discuss the specific grounds for downward departure contained in the Commission's policy statement in the applicable criminal history section of the guidelines. Recognition of the potentially harsh consequences arising out of blind adherence to the criminal history score and career offender definition apparently prompted the Commission to include additional grounds for downward departure from these provisions when the resulting score over-represents the seriousness of a defendant’s criminal history. Thus, the Commission issued a policy statement declaring,
There may be cases where the court concludes that a defendant’s criminal history category significantly over-represents the seriousness of a defendant’s criminal history or the likelihood that the defendant will commit further crimes.... The court may conclude that the defendant’s criminal history was significantly less serious than that of most defendants in the same criminal history category [ ], and therefore consider a downward departure from the guidelines.
U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3. This policy statement applies to those defendants who meet the criteria as “career offenders” under the criminal history section. United States v. Lawrence, 916 F.2d 553 (9th Cir.1990); United States v. Brown, 903 F.2d 540, 544 (8th Cir.1990) (Downward departure from career offender provision appropriate under U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3 “where the guidelines sentence overemphasizes the severity of the conduct or the defendant’s criminal history”).
The sentencing judge here, in effect, concluded that the career offender provision, which drastically increased Shoupe’s prison sentence from two to fourteen years, overrepresented the seriousness of Shoupe’s criminal history. Shoupe sold cocaine on the streets by the gram. He was not, however, a manufacturer, importer, or major supplier of drugs. The Government viewed him as a “street level dealer.” Pre-sentence Report at ¶ 8. He did not carry a gun.. A straight application of the sentencing guidelines for this offense taking into consideration Shoupe’s past criminal history but without reference to the career offender provision would have earned Shoupe a sentence of about two years imprisonment.1 Indeed, other defendants sentenced with Shoupe, who, according to Shoupe’s counsel played a more pivotal and active role in the drug trafficking, received sentences of approximately four years because they escaped the career offender status.
Shoupe barely fell within the letter of the career offender definition in two respects. The two earliest offenses counted for purposes of this provision, the burglary and robbery, occurred in quick succession when Shoupe was only 18 years old (the robbery coming one day after his eighteenth birthday) and nearly fifteen years prior to the instant drug offense. Thus, he barely made the very margin of the definition of “career offender” in the guideline. The sentencing judge also considered Shoupe’s counsel’s representation that he committed these earlier offenses when he was a mixed up kid having been raised by an abusive stepmother. In deciding to depart downward, the sentencing judge stated that there was a period of ten years during which Shoupe did not commit any offenses and also considered that Shoupe provided support for a young son. I believe that the sentencing judge did not err in concluding that Shoupe’s sentencing score under the *123career offender provision over-represented the seriousness of his criminal history and the instant offense.
The majority, however, applies the definition of “career offender” mechanically and rigidly, stating at typescript page 120:
Simply because a case falls close to the line does not make it extraordinary. If we recognized a zone of extraordinary cases extending for some period of time after the statutory cut-off, we would undoubtedly be confronted with cases falling just beyond this zone and would then be required to decide whether these cases were also extraordinary.
The majority, thus, declines to deviate from an inflexible application of the letter of the career offender definition. Other courts, however, have read the provision more flexibly.
In United States v. Lawrence, 916 F.2d 553 (9th Cir.1990), the court permitted a downward departure for a defendant who met the definition of “career offender” from a sentence between 12.6 to 15.6 years to a sentence of 2.5 years, based in part on testimony from a psychiatrist that the defendant was not violent or antisocial and the likelihood of recidivism was low. The Government argued there that the obligatory language of the career offender statute required the court to apply its definition rigidly without regard to other provisions of the sentencing guidelines, including the criminal history provision. The court rejected the Government’s position and declared that “the district court was entitled to rely on ‘any ... policy statement [ ] or commentary in the guidelines that might warrant consideration in imposing sentence.’ ” Id. at 554, quoting U.S.S.G. § lBl.l(i).
The court in Lawrence concluded that the Government read the sentencing statute, 28 U.S.C. § 994, out of context. The court asserted that “the statute as a whole gives many directions to the Commission to follow in formulating the guidelines, including 28 U.S.C. § 994(t) that ‘[t]he Commission ... shall describe what should be considered extraordinary and compelling reasons for sentence reduction.’ ” Id. at 555 (emphasis added). Thus, there is respectable authority and practical considerations supporting that mandatory language of the statute authorizing the career offender provision should not be read so as to negate other mandatory instructions elsewhere in the statute. The Application Instructions to the guidelines, U.S.S.G. § 1B1.1, require that the guidelines be read as a whole. Reading the literal, inflexible definition of “career offender” in isolation from the instructions to reduce a defendant’s sentence where the criminal history score over-represents his crimes thus contravenes the interpretive approach mandated by the guidelines themselves.
Similarly, the court in United States v. Brown, 903 F.2d 540 (8th Cir.1990), reversed the sentencing court for rigidly adhering to the career offender provision because it believed itself so bound. Rejecting the absolutist position advanced by the Government, Chief Judge Lay held that departure from the career offender provision “may be appropriate where the guidelines sentence overemphasizes the severity of the conduct or the defendant’s criminal history.” Id. at 544.2
In contrast to the majority’s belief that the boundaries of the career offender defi*124nition offer no room for flexibility, courts also have sought to adjust the definition so as to classify a defendant as a “career offender” who fell just outside the letter of the provision. Thus, in United States v. Gardner, 905 F.2d 1432 (10th Cir.) cert. denied, — U.S. —, 111 S.Ct. 202, 112 L.Ed.2d 163 (1990), the court authorized sentencing the defendant as a “career offender,” even though the defendant just failed to meet the definition. The court noted that the defendant met the first two criteria of a career offender and just missed the fifteen-year cutoff for the third criteria. Id. at 1439. See also, United States v. Medved, 905 F.2d 935 (6th Cir.1990) cert. denied, — U.S. —, 111 S.Ct. 997, 112 L.Ed.2d 1080 (1991). I can discern no principled reason for permitting sentencing judges to adjust the definition of “career offender” to impose a harsher sentence and refuse that discretion when the trial judge believes a more lenient sentence is just.
Other courts have affirmed substantial downward departures from the career offender provision where the departure was not opposed by the Government.3 This transfer of discretion and control over sentencing from trial judges to government attorneys illustrates what one federal courts study committee referred to as the “perverse effect” of the sentencing guidelines. Federal Courts Study Committee Tentative Recommendations for Public Comment, December 22, 1989 at 62. One court has further quipped that “Congress has thus shifted discretion from persons who have demonstrated essential qualifications to the satisfaction of their peers, ... to persons who may be barely out of law school with scant life experience and whose common sense may be an unproven asset.” United States v. Boshell, 728 F.Supp. 632, 637 (E.D.Wash.1990).
In light of other courts’ willingness to depart from this provision, the majority offers no explanation why the court must be handcuffed to an iron-clad application of the “career offender” definition in this case, when a seasoned veteran of the trial court concluded to the contrary. In the instant case, Chief Judge Conaboy, the sentencing judge, has served as a United States district judge for over a decade, as a judge of a busy state trial court for seventeen years, and as past president of the Pennsylvania Conference of State Trial Judges. He obviously has had a great deal of judicial experience at the trial level; more experience with sentencing indeed than the government attorneys who urged the reversal of the district court’s imposition of sentence.
One might believe that the majority’s rigid adherence to the guideline definition of “career offender” will ensure that sentencing will be rid of irrational and unwarranted disparities. That is not necessarily true. For example, in a recent case, a defendant was convicted of importing 1,005 pounds of marijuana into the United States. United States v. Delvecchio, 920 F.2d 810 (11th Cir.1991). He had two prior convictions; one for importing 25,840 pounds of marijuana in May 1978 and another for importing approximately 30,000 pounds of marijuana in April 1980. Rigid application of the guidelines required that he not be sentenced as a “career offender” simply because the two prior convictions had been consolidated for sentencing. Shoupe, on the other hand, whose only drug convictions involved petty street dealing by the gram, qualifies for the drastic enhancements authorized by the career offender guideline. If the noble aims of the sentencing guidelines are to be achieved— to reduce irrational disparity and enhance *125fairness in the sentencing process — then sentencing courts must be permitted to exercise some discretion to fine-tune the application of the guidelines to unique circumstances often presented in individual cases, especially where those cases fall close to the boundaries of a harsh provision like the career offender guideline. One can hardly expect that in today’s complex society a mechanistic sentencing grid will adequately foresee the often extraordinary circumstances presented by the many thousands of criminal offenders that appear in our courts annually.
If the majority is correct as a legal matter, however, and sentencing judges must slavishly adhere to the harsh format of the career offender guideline, then I must anchor my dissent in a principle far more fundamental than a technical argument about how to apply the sentencing guidelines. In our system of criminal justice, neither Congress nor the Sentencing Commission nor the Guidelines themselves, nor the Government, nor this court has the authority to pronounce sentence upon a convicted defendant. The sentencing judge alone has such authority and consequently bears the agonizing moral burden of that decision. Can we, sitting separately and far removed from the center where punishment is meted out by and to flesh and blood, require that a sentencing judge impose a sentence which the judge conscientiously believes is fundamentally impractical, unsound, and unjust? If such a result is mandated by the career offender provision, I, like our esteemed colleague in the First Judicial Circuit, former Chief Judge Coffin, must “register my abiding concern with the career offender provision,” which removes “all discretion from district judges in such cases [and] substantially alters our notion of just punishment, both in absolute terms and relative to that of other offenders.” United States v. Tony Allen Leavitt, 925 F.2d 516 (1st Cir.1991) (Coffin, J., concurring).
Accordingly, I would affirm the sentence imposed by the district court.

. Under guideline 2D1.1(a)(3), the offense level for his conviction for distributing 13.5 grams of cocaine was twelve (minus two points for acceptance of responsibility); Shoupe's past convictions landed him a criminal history score of twelve under guideline 4A1.1. Thus, a straight application of the sentencing guidelines, without reference to the career offender category, would have brought Shoupe a sentence of 21-27 months imprisonment.

. For other cases similarly permitting substantial downward departures from the career offender provision, see United States v. Maddalena, 893 F.2d 815 (6th Cir.1989) (holding that sentencing court had discretion to consider defendant’s attempts to stay away from drugs in departing downward from career offender provision); United States v. Brittman, 750 F.Supp. 388 (E.D.Ark.1990) (granting defendant substantial downward departure because career offender provision over-represented the seriousness of his criminal history); United States v. Nichols, 740 F.Supp. 1332 (N.D.Ill.1990) (granting substantial downward departure from career offender provision because of the age of defendant, the minute quantify of drugs involved, and the absence of violence from any of the prior offenses); and United States v. Garrett, 712 F.Supp. 1327 (N.D.Ill.1989) aff'd 903 F.2d 1105 (7th Cir.) cert. denied, — U.S. —, 111 S.Ct. 272, 112 L.Ed.2d 227 (1990) (granting substantial downward departure from career offender sentence of 35 years because the defendant was 42 years old and under such a long sentence would "die in prison”).

. See, e.g., United States v. Ybabez, 919 F.2d 508 (8th Cir.1990) (Government permitted departure from 210-262 months down to 150 months and court affirmed); United States v. Dean, 908 F.2d 215 (7th Cir.1990) (Government permitted downward departure for “career offender” from sentence of 30 years-life to 6 years and court affirmed); United States v. Gant, 902 F.2d 570 (7th Cir.1990) (Government permitted downward departure for "career offender” from a sentencing range of 210-262 months to 120 months and court affirmed); United States v. Left Hand Bull, 901 F.2d 647 (8th Cir.1990) (affirming departure from 51-63 months to 48 months); United States v. Jones, 898 F.2d 1461 (10th Cir.) cert. denied, — U.S. —, 111 S.Ct. 111, 112 L.Ed.2d 81 (1990) (affirming departure from 210-240 months down to 156 months for “career offender's" cooperation with the government).