Court Opinion

ID: 9487567
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:20:27.336109+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:21.406451
License: Public Domain

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part:
Unlike the defendant in Pacione, Joshua Sanders fails to present a particularly sympathetic figure. His threats were not the product of traumatic family illness, and his victim was not an insensitive IRS agent. Rather, Sanders was drunk and motivated by racial animosity. Although Sanders’ conduct may evoke considerably less compassion and pity than that of the Pacione defendant, he is equally deserving of a lawful sentence for his crime and a fair application of the sentencing guidelines to his criminal conduct.
I disagree with the majority’s and the district court’s conclusion that Sanders was not entitled to a four-level reduction in offense level at sentencing. In my opinion, the determination that Sanders’ illegal acts did not constitute a “single instance evidencing little or no deliberation” is based on a misinterpretation of § 2A6.1(b)(2) of the Sentencing Guidelines.
I would point out preliminarily that our disagreement over the proper interpretation of the Sentencing Guidelines in this case exemplifies the complexity inherent in applying the Guidelines, and the predicament that this complexity poses for defendants. The government’s presentence report originally suggested that if Sanders pled guilty to two felonies, rather than a felony and a misdemeanor, he would have a lower offense level and thus a lower sentence. In light of the report, and on the advice of counsel, Sanders withdrew his guilty plea to the misdemeanor and pled guilty to the second felony, believing that by doing so he could reduce his time of imprisonment from five months to proba*488tion only.1 He ended up being sentenced to 15 months instead. This occurred only because at the original sentencing hearing, no one — not the judge, nor either counsel— could predict with any accuracy what would be the ultimate consequence of Sanders’ change in plea. The Guidelines are too complicated for that. As the district court explained to Sanders, both with candor and with some degree of prescience, “I wouldn’t expect you to understand [the Guidelines] because judges and lawyers argue about them all the time.”2
Although the Guidelines were enacted in reaction to the supposedly arbitrary and unpredictable results of the prior unregulated sentencing regime, the treatment of the defendant here shows that application of the Guidelines can easily produce results that are at least as arbitrary and unpredictable. Certainly, few would suggest that the manner in which the proceedings were handled here was fair or equitable. Nor in all candor, I must add, is such a state of affairs unusual in the Guidelines era.
The majority finds that the phrase “a single instance evidencing little or no deliberation,” as used in § 2A6.1(b)(2), is not broad enough to cover a drunken individual’s writing of two short and remarkably similar hate letters during a brief time period. I disagree.

A Single Instance

In declining to extend Sanders the “single instance” reduction, the district court apparently interpreted the word “instance,” as meaning “threat,” rather than “episode.” Although the majority concedes that “single instance” may be broad enough to include a single episode of conduct encompassing more than one discrete threat, it concludes that the term must be evaluated with reference to the motivation of the threats as well as the time span in which they occurred. It then engages in a bit of artful appellate fact-finding and determines that two separate motivations underlay Sanders’ actions. By doing so, the majority shoes the cheese far too thin as far as I am concerned. Sanders’ two letters are clearly linked by motivation as well as time, and, in my view, constitute a single incident.
After returning home at night drunk, Sanders wrote the two hate letters at the same time, mailed them on the same trip to town, and was asleep by 3 or 4 a.m. All of the relevant conduct occurred within a very brief period. Moreover, the letters were the product of a single impulse to vent feelings of bigotry. Both letters contained swastikas and slurs, and the envelopes contained equally simplistic derogatory phrases. The puerile and stick-like drawings inside could each have been drawn by the same third grader.
*489Sanders’ choice of a Fairfield synagogue and the Fairfield NAACP was closely related: they were both representatives of a threat to “Aryan supremacy.” Although Jews and African-Americans are two distinct social groups, it is highly artificial, as well as suppositious, to suggest that Sanders’ derogation of these two groups was “based on two separate sets of prejudices, and two separate sets of motives.” Maj. op. at 14353. Sanders was hardly sophisticated enough to have two separate sets of thoughts. However, if we wish to ignore the content of his pitiful writings and pretend that he was indeed a sophisticated being, then we must recognize that both of the involved groups share the common link of being non-Aryan, and that Sanders’ letters were motivated by a singular desire to express his animosity towards “inferior” or non-Aryan peoples.
The majority attempts to minimize the commonality of Sanders’ letters by emphasizing that the letters show a “tailoring .... to the particular religious or racial characteristics of the group.” The term “tailoring” connotes a kind of careful crafting, an attention to detail and fit. Again, the majority writes as if we were dealing with a thinking person and a rational pair of letters. That is far from the case.3 The abstract and careful analysis that the majority purports to apply to the two idiotic messages, and the rationality and intellectual conduct that it imputes to the defendant, have nothing to do with what actually occurred. The facts are plain and simple. A drunken boor sat down and unthinkingly wrote two hate letters that delivered the same ugly message. He engaged in no subtle analysis and performed no “tailoring.” To him, African-Americans and Jews were the same. To say that these unfortunate messages were tailored to the racial or religious characteristics of the recipients not only ignores the nature of the defendant’s ramblings, but requires us to engage in an abstract parsing of the ambiguous and cumbersome sentences of the Guidelines. All that is accomplished by these futile and contrived intellectual exercises is to sustain a result, and a sentence, that is just plain wrong.

Significant Deliberation

The district court examined the defendant’s conduct in sending the letters, and dissected that conduct into all of its constituent steps. Having done so, and having found several steps with respect to each letter, the court found “significant deliberation” as to each. However, under this scrutiny, the mailing of any letter would be the product of significant deliberation. Any letter requires writing something, selecting the addressee, finding the addressee’s address, attaching a stamp, and putting it in a mailbox. Because 18 U.S.C. § 876 prohibits the mailing of a threatening communication, the steps enumerated by the district court are merely the essential and ordinary ones for a violation of the statute.
Recognizing that the district court’s argument proves too much, the majority attempts to bolster the deliberation finding by dissecting the constituent steps of delivering any threat, and declares that these steps demonstrate “time and attention.” For every threatening communication, the defendant must “select” a victim and make some statement designed to upset and elicit fear from the recipients. It seems clear, therefore, that at a minimum deliberation for purposes of § 2A6.1(b)(2) requires some showing beyond the deliberation inherent in any intentional threat, and that the majority’s rationalizations do not cure the district court’s error.
Moreover, there is no reasonable basis for concluding that any element of Sanders’ behavior satisfied even the erroneous definition of “deliberation” established by the majority. Sanders was drunk and angry, and hardly in a deliberative state. The letters were handwritten, extremely short, full of misspellings,4 and contained epithets typical of outbursts of *490bigotry. They were clearly the product of no deliberation at all.5
To stretch the law as the district court did in this case, and as the majority now does also, makes no practical sense. We send a young person to prison for 15 months for getting drunk and, in his drunken stupor, mailing two irrational hate letters. The defendant’s state of mind at the time he committed the offense may best be demonstrated by the fact that he affixed his return address to both missives. Surely, there are more sensible ways for society to deal with this young defendant’s conduct; surely, there are better ways to try to rehabilitate him and try to make of him a useful citizen; surely, we should at least first try to teach him that, if not soon cured, his bigotry will be the cause of his own destruction rather than the destruction of the groups he stupidly despises; and surely there must be better uses for our prisons, which are already more than filled to capacity and are on the verge of exacerbating our local, state, and federal governments’ economic distress to the breaking point.
In part the error in this ease lies in the district judge’s construction of the Guidelines — in part it lies in the refusal of my colleagues to treat his error in the manner required by law. The most fundamental problem of all, however, lies with the Sentencing Guidelines, and their attempt to set rigid standards that in the end produce far more confusion and unfairness than existed prior to their adoption. Only Congress can correct that fundamental problem, and regrettably there is little reason to believe it will.
I therefore dissent in part and concur in part.
*491APPENDIX
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*492[[Image here]]

. As the Assistant United States Attorney emphasized at oral argument, Sanders' trial counsel knew that, given the parties’ disagreement over the application of § 2A6.1(b)(2), there was no guarantee that Sanders’ change of plea would result in a lower sentence. Counsel’s advice to Sanders to hazard the change of plea may have been mistaken (as it clearly was in retrospect). A review of some of Sanders' other trial papers indicates that, aside from this issue, Sanders may not have benefited from the most effective legal assistance. Nonetheless, in this situation, with these variable factors, even the best of lawyers could not have given Sanders more than an educated guess regarding his sentence under the Guidelines.

. The twists in Sanders' sentencing saga were further complicated by our original unpublished disposition in this case remanding for resentenc-ing. In a footnote, the majority erroneously stated that under a revised criminal history calculation, the applicable guidelines range was 10 to 16 months. On remand, the magistrate said the guidelines were veiy complicated and presumed that surely the appellate court had it right. Thus, he released Sanders because Sanders was originally sentenced to the minimum end of the then-applicable range, and under the new appellate formulation, Sanders had already served the minimum ten months.
Subsequently, the government filed a motion to correct this "typographical” error in the disposition. Because we granted the government’s separate motion to publish the disposition, the former motion was not addressed. In the present published disposition, this "erroneous” footnote has been eliminated. Presumably the majority now feels confident that 15 months is the applicable minimum for the sentencing range under a correct reading of the sentencing guidelines. Correct or not, the way that the courts have dealt with the sentencing issue in this case does not promote confidence in either the sentencing regime or the justice system.

. A reproduction of the letters can be found in the attached appendix.

. The misspellings might seem irrelevant, but even the act of looking words up in the dictionary would evidence a higher degree of deliberation than shown here.

. In contrast, the defendant's conduct in Pacione, in which the four-level reduction was granted, evidences significantly more deliberation. There, during working hours, the defendant called the IRS agent, threatened her, gathered together a friend to help him out, drove to the IRS office, and conveyed a new threat. Pacione, 950 F.2d at 1351.