2004—In United States v. Bad Marriage, a divided Ninth Circuit panel rejects the 41-month prison sentence received by the aptly named Mr. Bad Marriage. Released from tribal jail so that he could attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Bad Marriage instead attacked his girlfriend. His guilty plea to a charge of assault resulting in bodily injury came on top of 35 prior state-court convictions and some 60 convictions in tribal court. Applying the Sentencing Guidelines’ rules for upward departures, the sentencing judge departed from the usual sentencing range based on his judgment that Bad Marriage was likely to commit other crimes.
On review, the majority opinion by Judge Warren Ferguson somehow sees fit to thunder that the case is “a powerful indictment of the criminal justice system” and that the problems of alcohol abuse and crime on Indian reservations “cry out for treatment, not simply more prison time.” Never mind, as dissenting judge Consuelo Callahan points out, that Bad Marriage was released from jail to get treatment when he instead assaulted his girlfriend. In the end, the panel’s spurious rejection of the upward departure causes Bad Marriage to be subjected to more prison time: Resentencing Bad Marriage after the Supreme Court’s January 2005 ruling (in United States v. Booker) that the Sentencing Guidelines are advisory, not mandatory, the district judge imposes, and a different Ninth Circuit panel affirms, a 49-month sentence.
2008—Poor Stephen Reinhardt. The Ninth Circuit arch-activist who has made a career of defying the Supreme Court—“They can’t catch them all,” he boasts of his wayward rulings—purports to take offense that a dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc in Belmontes v. Ayers (see This Day for June 13, 2008) implies that his rulings in that case have “flouted the will of the Supreme Court.” Some eleven months later, in a unanimous per curiam opinion (in Wong v. Belmontes), the Supreme Court summarily reverses Reinhardt—the third time in this same case that the Court has reversed or vacated one of his rulings. Further, the Court states that it finds his reasoning incomprehensible and fanciful, and it notes his manipulative recharacterization of the evidence. (See This Day for November 16, 2009.)