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Some Legal Kibbles – Update for March 20, 2017

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

kibbles170320Today, we offer a few kibbles of legal interest that have been cluttering our dog pound for the last few days…

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US ATTORNEYS TO FOCUS ON VIOLENT CRIME, WHICH INCLUDES DRUG TRAFFICKING

There is some indication that the Trump Administration may be expanding violent crime enforcement activities, a category which Attorney General Jeffrey Sessions believes must include gun and drug offenses. In keeping with the President’s fixation on violent crime, Sessions last week ordered United States Attorneys to work with with local and state prosecutors “to investigate, prosecute and deter the most violent offenders.”

Sessions’ directive said, “federal prosecutors should coordinate with state and local counterparts to identify the venue (federal or state) that best ensures an immediate and appropriate penalty for these violent offenders.”

Attorney General Jeffrey Sessions
Attorney General Jeffrey Sessions

In keeping with the new emphasis on violent crime, Sessions has appointed Steve Cook, chief of the Criminal Division for the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and one of last year’s most vocal opponents of sentencing reform, as associate deputy attorney general with a mandate to focus on violent crime. Cook told a newspaper last year, “When you put criminals in jail, crime goes down. That’s what incapacitation is designed to do, and it works.” He called the idea that most offenders in federal prisons are nonviolent drug pushers is a myth.

violent160620Some critics the emphasis on violent crime as federal encroachment. “An expanded federal criminal justice agenda comprised of federal-state-local task forces targeting violent offenses and coupled with tougher federal sentences would be a substantial change in practice and a step in the wrong direction,” says Ryan King, senior fellow at the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center.

Tougher sentences could quickly reverse declines in BOP inmate population, especially in higher-level joints. According to a new Prison Policy Initiative report, 50% of the 189,000 federal prison inmates were convicted of drug offenses. Violent-crime convictions account for just 7% of the federal total.

The Crime Report, At ‘critical moment’ under Trump, report gives hard facts on incarceration (Mar. 14, 2017)

The Trace, Meet the hardliner Jeff Sessions picked to carry out his violent crime crackdown (Mar. 15, 2017)
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WE’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER

The U.S. Sentencing Commission last week released its 21st annual Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics, covering fiscal year.

stats170320The current-year book is available online as an interactive book that defies downloading. It contains a wealth of sentencing stats broken down in over 100 tables (as well as sentencing date by federal district, another 97 tables).

Slogging through the Sourcebook takes awhile, but it yields a lot of fascinating data. Of special interest:

•   the number of cases ending with guilty pleas remained steady at 97%

•   offenses included 32% drug, 30% immigration, white-collar (including fraud) 13%, guns 11%, child porn 3%.

•   14% of people challenging their sentences on direct appeal won reversal, but only 5% ended up with a better sentence.

•  two out of three resentencings resulted from the 2-level reduction for drug offenses, Rule 35(b) reductions for helping the government were 11% of resentencings, and 10% were from wins on 2255 motions.

• continuing the pathetic performance on compassionate release, the courts granted a total of 51 inmates sentence reduction (a mere 0.4% of all resentencings).

•   in new sentencings last year, 49% were within the Guidelines range, a two-percent increase over last year. Only 2% of sentences were above the range, while 19% were below the range for reasons other than government motion. About 20% of sentences were reduced because the defendant helped the government, and another 9% were cut for early disposition of an immigration case.

U.S. Sentencing Commission, Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics 2016  (Mar. 12, 2017)
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PLEA BREACHES AND PLAIN ERROR

Like 97% of other federal defendants, Jim Kirkland made a deal with the government to plead guilty. In exchange, the government agreed to recommend the bottom of the guidelines range at sentencing.

But when Jim stood in front of the judge, the government went crazy on him, not just failing to recommend the bottom, but instead pushing for the very top, and bringing in live testimony of how terrible a few of his prior state crimes had been. The probation officer recommended the dead center of the sentencing range, and the judge gave it to him, saying that was what he had had in mind all along.

betray170320Jim’s sentencing lawyer must have been snoring too loudly to object, but on appeal, Jim raised the government’s plea breach. The AUSA admitted it was a plain breach, but argued the error did not affect Jim’s substantial rights or seriously affect “the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings,” two of the standard Jim had to meet before proving F.R.Crim.P. 52(b) “plain error.” The government’s rationale was that the district judge said he said the 300-month midpoint sentence “frankly, happens to coincide with my own independent decision,” and that was sufficient evidence that the court would have imposed the same exact sentence even if the AUSA had recommended the bottom of the guidelines.

Last week, the 5th Circuit agreed with Jim. Clearly unhappy at the government’s breach of its promise, the Court said “the government did not merely recommend a high-end sentence but also strongly argued and presented testimony in support of that recommendation, recounting in great detail the graphic and… explicit facts involved in Kirkland’s offense of conviction and a prior offense and emphasizing his criminal history and his violation of the conditions of his supervised release. The testimony and argument by the Government filled more than nine pages of the sentencing transcript. Therefore, the district court may have been influenced not only by the Government’s recommendation, but also by Government’s passionate emphasis of aggravating factors in support of that recommendation, which brought public safety concerns to the forefront.”

When the government breaches a plea agreement, a defendant may either ask the court to order specific performance of the plea agreement and resentencing before a different judge, or withdrawal of the guilty plea. Jim asked for and got resentencing before a new judge.

United States v. Kirkland, Case No. 16-40255 (Mar. 17, 2017)

– Thomas L. Root

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All Physical Force is Not “Physical Force” – Update for Wednesday, March 15, 2017

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

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4TH CIRCUIT REVERSES SELF, HOLDS VIRGINIA COMMON-LAW ROBBERY IS NOT VIOLENT

With all of the recent news about Beckles v. United States, where the Supreme Court held that constitutional vagueness cannot apply to Guidelines sentences, it’s easy to forget that there is still a burgeoning legal industry in weighing whether crimes once thought to be violent for Armed Career Criminal Act cases are still violent.

violent170315The ACCA enhances the sentence of a felon caught with a gun if he (or in rare cases, she) has three prior qualifying convictions. The convictions may be serious drug offenses or “crimes of violence.” A “crime of violence” has traditionally been (1) burglary, arson, extortion or use of explosives (the “Enumerated Clause”); (2) a crime that involves use or attempt to use physical force (the “Force Clause”); or (3) a crime that involves significant risk that physical force may be used (the “Residual Clause”).

In 2015, Johnson v. United States held that the Residual Clause was unconstitutionally vague. In the wake of the decision – which was held by the Supreme Court to retroactively apply to people already convicted of ACCA offenses – prisoners have been returning to court to escape harsh ACCA sentences (which start at 15 years) where their predicate offenses no longer qualify.

A substantial procedural problem for a lot of the defendants is that the district courts often did not bother to explain under which ACCA clause their prior crimes fit. It hardly seemed to matter: if someone had been convicted of robbery, it seemed to fit under the Force Clause or the Residual Clause, so it hardly mattered to the outcome which clause it was on which the sentencing judge relied.

After Johnson, however, it suddenly made a big difference. It certainly did to Bobby Winston, who got 275 months back on 2002 for a felon-in-possession charge, where one of the predicate crimes was Virginia common-law robbery. The Johnson retroactivity gave prisoners a one-year window to file motions under 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2255 seeking relief if Residual Clause cases had been used to bootstrap their convictions into ACCA sentences. Bobby filed, arguing that the Virginia common-law robbery could no longer be a predicate for his lengthy sentence.

buzzsaw70315Bobby ran straight into a procedural buzzsaw. The government argued that his 2255 motion had to be dismissed., because the district court had never said Virginia common-law robbery was a Residual Clause offense. The government contended it was a Force Clause offense, which was consistent with a 22-year old 4th Circuit decision that the Virginia crime employed physical force.

Monday, the 4th Circuit handed Bobby a win. First, the Circuit rejected the government’s procedural roadblock, holding that which the sentencing record did not establish that the Residual Clause served as the basis for concluding that Bobby’s common-law robbery conviction was a violent felony, “nothing in the law requires a court to specify which clause… it relied upon in imposing a sentence.” The appellate panel said, “We will not penalize a movant for a court’s discretionary choice not to specify under which clause of Section 924(e)(2)(B) an offense qualified as a violent felony. Thus, imposing the burden on movants urged by the government in the present case would result in selective application of the new rule of constitutional law announced in Johnson, violating the principle of treating similarly situated defendants the same.”

But is Virginia common-law robbery a violent crime? The 4th noted that since its 1995 decision that the offense qualified, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Force Clause only applied to “violent force… capable of causing physical pain or injury to another person.” Applying that standard, the Circuit said, requires that the federal court adhere to how state courts apply the offense, focusing on “the “minimum conduct criminalized by state law, including any conduct giving rise to a realistic probability, not a theoretical possibility that a state would apply the law and uphold a conviction based on such conduct.”

Common-law robbery or a simple purse-snatching?
Common-law robbery or a simple purse-snatching?

Virginia courts have held that commission of common-law robbery by violence requires only a “slight” degree of violence, “for anything which calls out resistance is sufficient.” The violence used to commit common-law robbery “does not need to be great or cause any actual harm to the victim.” Thus, in one case, when a defendant grabbed a woman’s purse with force enough to spin her around but not cause her to fall, the force was enough for common-law robbery, but was not violent force within the U.S. Supreme Court’s definition.

Therefore, the 4th said, Virginia common-law robbery was no longer a crime of violence, and it will not support an ACCA conviction.

United States v. Winston, Case No. 16-7252 (4th Cir., March 13, 2017)

– Thomas L. Root

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Does the Beckles Cloud Have a Silver Lining? – Update for March 7, 2017

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

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SUPREME COURT FURTHER MUDDLES GUIDELINES

In a decision long awaited by federal inmates, the Supreme Court yesterday held that unlike criminal statutes, the federal sentencing guidelines can never be void for vagueness. But in so ruling, the Court may have weakened the guidelines rather than strengthened them.

silverlining170307The history: In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. United States that a part of the definition of “crime of violence” found in the Armed Career Criminal Act – the “residual clause” that swept up offenses with a significant chance that someone might get hurt as being violent – was unconstitutionally vague. That ruling made sense: crimes such as drunk driving and not stopping for the police were being called “violent,” and on the strength of such dubious definitions, the law was making 51-month sentences into 15-year bits.

Unfortunately, the definition of “crime of violence” (along with the “residual clause”) was not just an ACCA provision. Instead, the same definition had metastasized throughout the criminal code and guidelines. Under the legal principle that quid est ius gander anserem condimentum (“what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”), inmates whose sentences had been shot into low-earth orbit by the guidelines’ “career offender” provision immediately began arguing that their sentences were based on an unconstitutionally vague “residual clause” as well.

sauce170307The United States Sentencing Commission lent some support to the argument. After Johnson, the Commission changed the guidelines’ “crime of violence” definition to comport with Johnson. But a few courts of appeal held that guidelines are different from statutes, and could never be void for vagueness.

Yesterday’s Decision: Beckles v. United States was such a case. Travis Beckles had been sentenced to double prison time for possessing a sawed-off shotgun under the “career offender” guideline. If the ACCA “crime of violence” definition was unintelligible, Travis argued, so was the guidelines definition that matched it word for word.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court disagreed. Because guidelines are merely advisory and judges hold the final authority on sentences, the Court held, defendants cannot successfully argue that a sentencing guideline is so vaguely worded as to violate the constitutional right to due process. Laws that “fix” the sentencing range can be challenged in ways that “advisory guidelines” simply cannot.

The Fallout: Beckles hobbles what has up to now been a well-honed defense tool, while exposing contradictions between the guidelines in theory and in practice in a way that almost guarantees further litigation.

Not if it's in the guidelines...
Not if it’s in the guidelines…

One former federal prosecutor notes, “Saying those guidelines can’t be challenged for vagueness takes away a tool for review and puts the onus on the Sentencing Commission to keep going back and looking at how they are being applied.”

Up to 2005, judges had been required by law to apply the Guidelines in sentencing. But in United States v. Booker, the Supreme Court decided mandatory guidelines the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 created were unconstitutional. Instead of throwing the whole law out, the court decided the guidelines should be considered advisory.

The broad opinion Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in Beckles built on Booker, differentiates between sentencing provisions in laws like the ACCA and the guidelines, which are subject to district courts’ discretion.

A former associate deputy attorney general who is now a law professor said the Beckles decision is a symptom of the hybrid situation that flowed from Booker: “You live in this weird world where the guidelines are both advisory and highly influential.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in Beckles with a scathing rejection of the majority’s reasoning. She argued that while the guidelines may be “advisory” in name, in practice judges often consider them a default, meaning they should get the same treatment as a law under the constitution. Ironically, this is the same argument that helped carry the day in a 2011 decision, Peugh v. United States, which held the guidelines could be subject to an ex post facto analysis.

Sotomayor argued that Booker tweaked the guidelines’s status but left them at the heart of the sentencing consideration — or as the court put it last year in Molina-Martinez v. United States, the “basis” for the sentence. “It follows from the central role that the guidelines play at sentencing,” Sotomayor wrote, “that they should be susceptible to vagueness challenges under the due process clause,” she wrote.

sweetbrown170307Another law professor who filed an amicus brief in Beckles argued yesterday that the majority’s ruling ignores the “messy reality” of federal sentencing. “It reads as though the federal sentencing guidelines are just advice for district court judges that they can take or leave as they want, but that’s just not true,” she said.

An optimistic footnote to Beckles: Justice Kennedy’s short concurring opinion may hint at another option for defendants. He wrote that while the legal tests for constitutional vagueness are ill fitted to the sentencing guidelines, a defendant might still run into a sentence that is “so arbitrary that it implicates constitutional concerns.” Kennedy said, “In that instance, a litigant might use the word vague in a general sense — that is to say, imprecise or unclear — in trying to establish that the sentencing decision was flawed.”

Most notably, Beckles underscores to district court judges that the guidelines are not just purely advisory, but occupy a place in the law that is considerably less that statute, and perhaps much less than regulation as well. “It sends a signal to district court judges and reinforces the message that is already out there that these guidelines are purely advisory,” one lawyer said.

That may embolden courts to deviate from guidelines to an even greater extent than they have before. Courts have repeatedly held that a within-guidelines sentence is “presumptively reasonable.” If those guidelines can be so vague as to defy fairness – too vague to survive a constitutional analysis were they statutes – how long can such a reasonableness presumption endure?

Beckles v. United States, Case No. 15–8544 (March 6, 2017)

– Thomas L. Root

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11th Circuit Holds Florida 2nd Degree Burglary No Crime of Violence – Update for January 13, 2017

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

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ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

Idust170113t’s been rough sailing for “crimes of violence” in the last few years, as courts have repeatedly limited the types of prior offenses that may be considered by federal courts as crimes of violence. This week, another one – a Florida burglary offense – fell.

This may seem rather dry to a lot of people. Who cares whether a past conviction was violent or not? A lot of people, it turns out, because whether a defendant’s prior crimes are crimes of violence or not makes a dramatic difference in sentencing. Under the Armed Career Criminal Act, for example, a convicted felon caught during deer season with a shotgun faces a maximum sentence of 10 years for violating 18 USC 922(g). But if his criminal history includes three crimes of violence, the minimum sentence starts at 15 years and maxes out at life. A number of other statutes and Guidelines also mete out additional punishment depending on whether a defendant’s criminal history is violent or not.

But doesn’t that sound like a good idea? Who needs violent criminals stalking our streets? After all, you convicted felons out there, sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime…

kermit170113Sure, piling on additional punishment for already-punished misdeeds is viscerally appealing, until you get into the fine print of what the law considers a violent crime to be. Right now, it’s defined as any burglary, extortion, arson or crime involving an explosive. Additionally, it’s any other crime that involves force or the threat of force.

Most of that sounds good, but what about the guy who 20 years ago, used to sneak into the neighbors’ chicken coops and steal some eggs? Or boosted some Twinkies from Walmart? Those are burglaries in most states. Those “crimes of violence” hardly make him a likely chainsaw killer on a rampage.

Part of the problem is that the parameters of the law of burglary vary widely from state to state. What’s called a burglary in one state may be called a simple breaking and entering elsewhere. In other words, the “crime of violence” definition was punishing people depending on whether state legislatures decided to use the “b”-word – burglary – in a statute.

shoplift170113In Taylor v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the term “burglary” to “generic” burglary – unlawful entry into a building or other fixed structure. Breaking into a car, boat, or airplane wouldn’t count. Taylor further made the fateful determination that the analysis of whether a prior conviction for “burglary” satisfied the generic definition of burglary was to be performed on a “categorical” basis. That is, the sentencing court was not to look at the actual facts of the case to decide whether the defendant’s conduct constituted generic burglary; rather, the court was to analyze the statute under which he was convicted to determine whether it “categorically” qualified as generic burglary.

The Supreme Court followed that decision in 2013 with Descamps v. United States, which expanded the use of the “categorical” approach. Johnson v. United States followed two years later, in which the Supreme Court eviscerated the statutory definition of “crime of violence” by invalidating the catch-all residual clause, which included in the definition any offense that carried the risk of harm to a victim, regardless of a defendant’s intent.

burglary160502Then, last summer, the Supreme Court decided Mathis v. United States, which resoundingly endorsed and further broadened the use of Descamps’ “categorical approach.”

One of the guys who cares about it is Juan Gabriel Garcia-Martinez. In 2009 Juan, a Mexican citizen in the United States illegally, was convicted in Florida of 2nd-degree burglary of a dwelling under Florida Statute § 810.02(3).

Florida defines burglary as “[e]ntering a dwelling, a structure, or a conveyance with the intent to commit an offense therein…” with the intent to commit an offense or a forcible felony. A 2nd degree burglary is one in which while committing the offense, the offender does not make an assault or battery and is not and does not become armed with a dangerous weapon or explosive. A “dwelling” is “a building or conveyance of any kind, including any attached porch, whether such building or conveyance is temporary or permanent, mobile or immobile, which has a roof over it and is designed to be occupied by people lodging therein at night, together with the curtilage thereof.” § 810.011(2)

deport170113After his Florida 2nd degree burglary conviction, Juan got booted from the United States and told never to come back. But he did. However, four years later, Juan was back, and immigration agents caught up with him in a Florida jail after he had been arrested for battery. He later pled guilty to illegal reentry after deportation.

The presentence investigation report assigned a base offense level of 8 under USSG § 2L1.2(a) and a 16-level increase under USSG § 2L1.2(b)(1)(A)(ii) for having committed a crime of violence – the 2nd degree burglary – prior to being deported. As a result, Juan faced a sentence of 41 to 51 months imprisonment.

On Wednesday, the 11th Circuit vacated the sentence. It held that the Florida 2nd-degree burglary statute was broader than the generic definition of burglary. The Florida definition of a “dwelling” included not just the building itself, but the curtilage as well. Curtilage is defined in Florida as an enclosure around a residence, such as a law surrounded by a hedgerow or a fenced-in backyard. The Circuit said, “Florida’s inclusion of curtilage in its definition of dwelling makes its burglary of a dwelling offense non-generic. Curtilage… is not categorically used or intended for use as a human habitation, home or residence because it can include the yard and, as the State acknowledges, potentially even outbuildings as long as they are located within the enclosure.”

Everywhere inside the stockade is curtilage...
                                                  Everywhere inside the stockade is curtilage…

Because Florida law defined curtilage as part of the dwelling for purposes of burglary, the 11th held the statute was indivisible, and thus – no matter what the facts of Juan’s burglary might have been – it was not a crime of violence.

The effect of the holding will be to cut Juan’s Guidelines range to a maximum of 14 months.

United States v. Garcia-Martinez, Case No. 14-15725 (11th Cir.  Jan. 11, 2017)

– Thomas L. Root

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