Court Opinion

ID: 9481020
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:05:37.211026+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:03.220721
License: Public Domain

RYAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring separately.
Although I agree that we are probably obligated to apply the Diaz-Villafane1 standard of review in this case, I write separately to express my dissatisfaction with it. The Diaz-Villafane approach is, I think, an uncommonly ill-conceived formula for reviewing sentence guidelines departures. It artificially fragments into three distinct components, each having a different standard of review, what is essentially a unitary trial court decision. In the first prong of its three standards of review in one, the Diaz-Villafane formula purports to make a question of law requiring de novo review of such vague notions as how “unusual” the case is, and whether the “circumstances” relied upon by the sentencing court for the departure decision “may be appropriately relied upon.” In the second of the three standards of review, it purports to make a question of fact, requiring a clearly erroneous standard of review, whether such unusual circumstances “actually exist.” The third standard of review, whether the sentence is “reasonable,” is reached only if the appellate court’s de novo conclusion is that the “case is sufficiently unusual to warrant departure” and the district court was not clearly erroneous in finding that the “circumstances” it relied on “actually exist[ed].”
The result, of course, is a review methodology that all but ignores the reality that the essence of a trial court’s departure decision, in most cases, is a product of the countless unquantifiable components of sentencing justice, including the interests of the victim, the defendant, his or her family and associates, and the “communities” involved, both immediate and remote. The Diaz-Villafane formula all but reads out of the sentence review process appropriate deference to the trial court’s logic, experience, wisdom, and unique insight into the case as they are to be applied in the complex art of criminal sentencing. The sum of the three Diaz-Villafane standards of review is an unsuccessful attempt to make objective what is largely, if not essentially, subjective; it attempts to make science of what is art.
Interestingly, no panel of this court has carefully analyzed the Diaz-Villafane review formula. The first case in which it was embraced simply employed it without analysis or even an express statement of adoption. See Rodriguez, 882 F.2d at 1067. Other panels followed suit, all without any analysis to the soundness of the Diaz-Vil-lafane methodology. Thus, a new theory • of legal analysis has become, in this circuit, an apparently settled method of proceeding.
Despite that the Diaz-Villafane approach is singularly unsuited to a sound analysis of the lawfulness of the trial court’s departure decision in this particular case, I concur in its application in this case in deference to our “law of the circuit” tradition and in the name of the maxim that it is sometimes better that the law be clear than that it be wise, if it cannot be both.

. United States v. Diaz-Villafane, 874 F.2d 43 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 177, 107 L.Ed.2d 133 (1989).