Court Opinion

ID: 9497360
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:49:31.542205+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:09.094056
License: Public Domain

EDITH H. JONES, Circuit Judge,
with RHESA HAWKINS BARKSDALE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I share Judge Smith’s concern regarding the inutility of this court’s continuing to hear sentencing guidelines cases en banc. I write separately, however, to dissent from what I believe is the majority’s pursuit of a “hyper-categorical” approach to sentencing enhancements for crimes of violence. Calderón-Peña plowed his car into another vehicle containing his children. The enhancement issue is whether this prior crime had “as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another.” U.S.S.G. § 2L1.2 cmt. n. 1(B)(ii). The majority, interpreting our recent en banc decision in United States v. Vargas-Duran, 356 F.3d 598 (5th Cir.2004), would hold that a criminal act may never be a “crime of violence” under this and similar enhancement provisions unless every imaginable way that an offense could be committed under a given statute of conviction requires the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force.
This approach is incorrect. It misreads the Supreme Court’s opinion in Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575, 110 S.Ct. 2143, 109 L.Ed.2d 607 (1990), misapplies this circuit’s precedents, does not comport *263with the more reasoned approach applied by our sister circuits, and reaches a patently absurd result. The proper application of Taylor would allow consideration of the facts contained in Calderon-Peña’s indictment not only to “narrow” the statute of conviction, as the majority concedes, but also to demonstrate that the intentional use of force was a key fact in Calderon-Peña’s underlying conviction for child endangerment. Under this view, his prior crime was a crime of violence that should require enhanced punishment under § 2L1.2 for this recidivist.

A. Understanding Taylor

Taylor held that in applying sentencing enhancements based on prior convictions, trial courts should generally “look only to the fact of the conviction and the statutory definition of the prior offense.” See Taylor, 495 U.S. at 600-02, 110 S.Ct. at 2159-60. The Court found such a “categorical approach” necessary because the legislative history of the enhancement statute there construed, whose language has been a model for later enactments, revealed that Congress did not want trial courts to “engage in an elaborate fact-finding process.” Id. at 601, 110 S.Ct. at 2159. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court also carefully noted that this approach permits a sentencing court to “go beyond the mere fact of conviction in a narrow range of cases” where the jury was required by the indictment or jury instructions to find all the elements of an offense that would fit within the enhancement. Id. at 602, 110 S.Ct. at 2160. Taylor, in my view, thus refines the pure categorical approach when a prior conviction is based on a statute that includes various types of conduct, some of which would trigger an enhancement and some of which would not. See id. at 600-02, 110 S.Ct. at 2159-60.
The enhancement of Taylor’s crime by the Supreme Court explains the technique. The career criminal statute there enhanced offenders’ penalties based on specific predicate offenses including “burglary.” Id. at 578, 110 S.Ct. at 2147. The Court held that burglary must have a uniform national meaning under a federal statute. It adopted the common definition of burglary as the entry into a building or other structure with the intent to commit a crime. See id. at 598, 110 S.Ct. at 2158. In some states, however, burglary statutes more broadly encompass places like automobiles and vending machines. Id. at 599, 110 S.Ct. at 2158. The Court accordingly reasoned that where a defendant is convicted under a broad burglary statute that “include[s] entry of an automobile as well as a building, if the indictment or information and jury instructions show that the defendant was charged only with a burglary of a building, and that the jury necessarily had to find an entry of a building to convict, then the government should be allowed to use the conviction for enhancement.” Id. at 602, 110 S.Ct. at 2160 (emphasis added). I infer that, under Taylor, if a state statute encompasses a range of conduct broader than that which invokes a federal enhancement, the sentencing court may properly consider the indictment and the jury instructions to determine whether the enhancement should be applied.
Properly read, Taylor requires courts first to decide whether a statute of conviction embodies a per se crime of violence under the relevant enhancement provision. Taylor, 495 U.S. at 602, 110 S.Ct. at 2160. If it does not, the inquiry ends and the prior offense may not be used to enhance a defendant’s sentence.1 As discussed in *264greater detail below, this court’s decision in Vargas-Duran—the opinion’s broad language notwithstanding — was made at this step of the Taylor inquiry. If, however, a predicate criminal statute contains subsections, or if the offense is described so broadly as to include some acts that fall within the “crime of violence” definition and some that do not, Taylor permits reference to the indictment and jury charge. See United States v. Landeros-Gonzales, 262 F.3d 424, 426 (5th Cir.2001); United States v. Allen, 282 F.3d 339 (5th Cir.2002). This order of analysis effectuates Congress’s clear intention, in adopting its “crime of violence” provision, to broaden the class of offenses eligible for certain sentence enhancements, while not bogging courts down in complex mini-trials over criminal history. I believe the majority’s adoption of Vargas-Duran’s hyper-categorical language unfairly exaggerates the latter concern while minimizing the former.

B. Vargas-Duran and Calderoru-Peña

The majority holds that Taylor’s “categorical approach” requires this court to imagine whether there are any circumstances, no matter how far removed from the plain facts of a recidivist’s prior crime, under which his statute of conviction may be violated without the use, attempted use, or threatened use of force. This conclusion assertedly derives from the guideline’s inquiry whether a prior crime “has as an element ” the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force. The majority relies on Vargas-Duran’s language, which suggests that in order for a “component” of a conviction to be an “element” of the offense, the component must be present under “any set of facts” that constitute a violation of the statute. 356 F.3d at 605. The majority believes not only that it may ignore the facts contained in Calderon-Peña’s indictment and guilty plea, but that it is unable to enhance his sentence because, under the open-ended language in Texas’s statutory offense of child endangerment, the statute might be violated in a non-violent manner. Under the majority’s reasoning, no offense charged under this provision may ever be classified as a crime of violence under § 4B1.2, no matter how brutal the conduct. The majority errs in two ways.
First, Vargas-Duran did not depend on this “any set of facts” language. Vargas-Duran, 356 F.3d at 605. In Vargas-Duran, the question before our court was whether the defendant’s prior intoxication assault conviction in Texas could be considered a crime of violence under the same “has as an element” language of the Guidelines. Id. at 599-600. The en banc majority, which I joined, held that force must be used intentionally for a given offense to qualify for the enhancement. Id. at 602-03. The majority concluded that because the Texas intoxication assault statute, by definition, does not require the proof of any mens rea, the intentional use of force could not be an “element” of the crime. Id. at 606. Vargas-Duran’s analysis stopped at what I have just described as Taylor’s first step. Its reference to the “any set of facts” approach was irrelevant *265to the case. As the majority acknowledges, the child endangerment statute is not amenable to first-step treatment at least on intentionality, as it can be violated in multiple ways and with various mental states:
A person commits an offense if he intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence, by act or omission, engages in conduct that places a child younger than 15 years in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.
Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 22.041(c) (Vernon 2003). The majority and I part company, however, on whether the statute includes conduct that has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of force. This disagreement reflects my second major bone of contention with the majority— on the definition of “elements” of an offense under the enhancement. As the Vargas-Duran opinion notes, Black’s Law Dictionary defines an element as “[a] constituent part of a claim that must be proved for the claim to succeed,” Black’s Law Dictionary 538 (7th ed.1999). Our court has held that “traditionally, an ‘offense’ was defined by its ‘elements,’ i.e., facts necessary to support a conviction for the offense,” United States v. Williams, 343 F.3d 424, 432 (5th Cir.2003). See Vargas-Duran, 356 F.3d at 605. The “elements” of an offense may be viewed generically under a statute’s language, as the majority does, or they may be considered particularly in light of what the defendant actually did to comprise the offense of conviction. Where, as here, a defendant pleads guilty to the particular offense based on explicit factual allegations in the indictment, the distinction made by the majority between the “elements” of the offense and the “manner and means” of the offense becomes purely theoretical. Further, that distinction does not serve the enhancement’s purpose of identifying and penalizing more strictly recidivists who engaged in violent crimes.
The majority does concede, helpfully, that if a statute has disjunctive elements or multiple subsections, rather than apply “any set of facts” to prevent all enhancements, the indictment’s allegations and jury charge may be used to “pare down” the statute to the precise subsection that was violated. But taking the next logical step, the court should have acknowledged that when a statute may, by the breadth of its language, irrespective of subparts, be violated in both violent and non-violent ways, the indictment and jury instructions may then be used to ascertain whether the underlying offense constituted a crime of violence under the guidelines. In failing to do so, the majority’s opinion forecloses a sensible and obvious path chosen by other circuits.

C. The Application of Taylor in Other Circuits

The majority’s reiteration of the “any set of facts” interpretation of Taylor runs counter to the approach adopted by a number of our sister circuits, including the First, Fourth, Eighth and D.C. Circuits. Each of these courts holds that where a statute may be violated in multiple ways— some of which qualify an offense as a crime of violence and some of which do not — a court may properly refer to the indictment and jury instructions.2
*266In Coleman, for instance, the Fourth Circuit considered whether a conviction for common-law assault under Maryland law constituted a “violent felony” requiring enhancement under the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984.3 The court held that where a predicate offense “may be committed in one of two ways, one of which requires a finding that physical force was used and the other of which does not, a district court must look past the fact of conviction and the elements of the offense to determine which type of offense supported the defendant’s conviction.” 158 F.3d at 202 (emphasis added). As a result, the en banc court held that the district court properly relied on the charging papers4 to determine that Coleman’s act of pointing a handgun at a police officer constituted a violent felony for the purposes of the federal sentencing enhancement. Id. at 202-03.
Relying on Coleman and its antecedents, the Fourth Circuit has also held that “the record of conviction, the charging document and the jury instructions” may be examined, consistent with Taylor, to determine whether a conspiracy conviction is a crime of violence. United States v. Ward, 171 F.3d 188, 192-93 (4th Cir.1999).
Similarly, in Kennedy, the D.C. Circuit held that the Hobbs Act is one example of *267a “generic” criminal statute whose violation requires a district court to examine the underlying indictment to determine whether the conviction qualifies as a “crime of violence” or a “serious violent felony” under federal sentencing law. Kennedy, 133 F.3d at 57. The Kennedy court held this approach acceptable under Taylor where “a statute provides for both violent and nonviolent means of violation,” id. at 58 (emphasis added), and “the mere fact of conviction under the Hobbs Act does not establish whether a defendant was convicted of a violent or nonviolent crime.”5
Under the majority’s “any set of facts” approach to the Taylor categorical inquiry, the result in conspiracy and Hobbs Act cases, and those of similar ilk, such as retaliation, would necessarily differ from Coleman and Kennedy. The majority, unfortunately, demonstrates neither its awareness of the overwhelmingly contrary precedents nor any explanation why it alone understands Taylor and the other circuits are wrong.
The majority does express concern that going beyond the statutory “elements” of a crime, even when the conviction’s underlying facts are plain and admitted, threatens to swallow the categorical approach in favor of real-act sentencing. I disagree. The First Circuit aptly explained that “[ujnder Taylor’s categorical approach, burglary is a crime of violence even if no violence was used in the particular case; and conversely, being a felon-in-possession is not a crime of violence even if the felon happened to shoot someone but was convicted only under the felon-in-possession statute.” See United States v. Sacko, 178 F.3d 1, 7 (1st Cir.1999) (noting that under Taylor’s categorical approach, the facts of the underlying offense are only relevant to “identify the statutory or common law offense” of conviction and that “collateral facts as to the defendant’s conduct on the earlier occasion are not relevant for any other purpose”). The majority’s concern is groundless.

D. Conclusion

In this case, applying a refined categorical approach would require us to hold, as common-sense dictates, that an individual who intentionally rams his car into another vehicle containing his children has committed a crime of violence. He pled guilty to the child endangerment offense on facts that proved his intention to threaten or use actual force against his children. While I agree with the result in our en banc decision in Vargas-Duran, unlike the majority, I would jettison that opinion’s overly broad “any set of facts” formulation — which the Vargas-Duran majority did not actually apply to decide that case. Rather, consistent with Taylor and the law of other circuits, we should look to the facts contained in the underlying indictment and jury instructions to apply crime of violence enhancements like that before us. I respectfully dissent.

. Our circuit's decisions in United States v. Chapa-Garza, 243 F.3d 921, 927 (5th Cir.*2642001) (felony DWI not a crime of violence under 18 U.S.C. § 16(b)), United States v. Charles, 301 F.3d 309, 314 (5th Cir.2002) (en banc) (theft of motor vehicle not a crime of violence under U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(2)), and United States v. Rodriguez-Rodriguez, 323 F.3d 317, 319 (5th Cir.2003) (burglary of a building and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle are not crimes of violence under the 16-level "has as an element” enhancement contained in U.S.S.G. § 2L1.2, but are per se crimes of violence under 18 U.S.C. § 16(b)), which involve various enhancement provisions, are all justifiable at this categorical level.

. See United States v. Gomez-Hernandez, 300 F.3d 974, 980 (8th Cir.2002) (where "the statutory definition [of the predicate offense] encompasses conduct which may or may not be included in the applicable guideline, we may look to the underlying charging papers to determine the elements of the crime to which the defendant pleaded guilty”); United States v. Coleman, 158 F.3d 199, 202 (4th Cir.1998) (en banc) (where a predicate offense "may be *266committed in one of two ways, one of which requires a finding that physical force was used and the other of which does not, a district court must look past the fact of conviction and the elements of the offense to determine which type of offense supported the defendant’s conviction”); United States v. Kennedy, 133 F.3d 53, 57 (D.C.Cir.1998) (a conviction under the Hobbs Act requires a district court to examine the indictment to determine whether the conviction qualifies for an enhancement); United States v. Damon, 127 F.3d 139, 142 (1st Cir.1997) (under Taylor, "a sentencing court may go beyond the fact of conviction in those cases where the statute encompasses both violent felonies ... and non-violent felonies....”). See also United States v. Shepard, 348 F.3d 308, 312-14 (1st Cir.2003); United States v. Londono-Quintero, 289 F.3d 147, 151 (1st Cir.2002) ("Where the statutory definition encompasses both predicate and non-predicate offenses, however, it may be necessary to go beyond the statute and the fact of conviction”); United States v. Harris, 964 F.2d 1234, 1235 (1st Cir.1992) (Breyer, C.J.) (noting that in cases where "a single statute ... covers more than one crime ... it would be appropriate for the sentencing court to look to the conduct ... not because the court may properly be interested (in this context) in the violent or nonviolent nature of that particular conduct, but because that conduct may indicate that the defendant and the government both believed that the generically violent crime ... rather than the generically non-violent crime ... was at issue”).
The majority criticizes this dissent’s reliance on the above cited cases. See Majority Op. at 258-59 n.7. Anyone reading this authority with care will find that it in fact supports the dissent's position. More telling is what the majority’s lengthy footnote does not say: Nowhere does the majority claim that the 1st, 4th, 8th or D.C. circuits follow the majority position. Footnote 7’s sole purpose is to assert that the majority view is not "perverse and anomalous.” Unfortunately, to achieve their end, the majority shamelessly stretches precedent. Compare Majority Op. at 258-59 n.7 (mischaracterizing the statute at issue in Coleman as "explicitly” requiring a violation of the law "in such a way that requires the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force,” and therefore falling within the Taylor exception) with Coleman, 158 F.3d at 202 ("Nevertheless, because one of the ways in which a Maryland common-law assault can be committed involves [not 'requires'] the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against another ....”) (emphasis added).

. This federal provision is the same one interpreted as to burglary in Taylor and contains the same language concerning the use of force as the "crime of violence” guideline before us in this case.

. Under Maryland law, the "charging papers” included the state-required affidavit of the complainant or arresting officer. Coleman, 158 F.3d at 202-03.

. The D.C. Circuit noted that its approach in Kennedy was consistent with Taylor because it "avoids the factual inquiry that concerned the Supreme Court in Taylor, but permits courts to treat violent crimes as Congress intended they be treated.” Id. at 57-58.