United States v. Ibrahim , 814 F.3d 30 ( 2016 )

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 15-1334
UNITED STATES,
Appellee,
v.
YAHYAA IBRAHIM,
Defendant, Appellant.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Mark L. Wolf, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Lynch, Circuit Judge,
Souter, Associate Justice,*
and Selya, Circuit Judge.
Judith H. Mizner, Assistant Federal Public Defender, with
whom Federal Public Defender Office was on brief, for appellant.
Jennifer A. Serafyn, Assistant United States Attorney, with
whom Carmen M. Ortiz, United States Attorney, was on brief, for
appellee.
February 18, 2016
* Hon. David H. Souter, Associate Justice (Ret.) of the
Supreme Court of the United States, sitting by designation.
SOUTER, Associate Justice. Yahyaa Ibrahim was indicted
for failure to register as a sex offender, and he filed two motions
to dismiss the indictment. The first challenged the
constitutionality of the registration requirement. No hearing was
requested and none was held for 344 days, until after the second
motion requested dismissal of the charges for violation of the
speedy trial requirement. After a hearing, each was denied, and
he pleaded guilty, though subject to the right to appeal the
denials of his motions. We affirm.
I
On June 4, 2013, Ibrahim was indicted for failure to
register as a sex offender under the Sex Offender Registration and
Notification Act (SORNA), 42 U.S.C. § 16913, in violation of 18
U.S.C. § 2250. On January 7, 2014 he sought leave of the district
court to file an oversized brief on the ground that his forthcoming
motion to dismiss the indictment raised complex issues. His
request was granted, and, on January 9, he filed the brief, which
claimed that SORNA was unconstitutional (the SORNA motion).
Specifically, he contended that Congress both exceeded its Article
I authority by enacting SORNA and violated the nondelegation
doctrine by giving the Attorney General power to determine SORNA's
applicability to pre-enactment offenders. The first paragraph of
the SORNA motion acknowledged that all of its arguments had been
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rejected by panels of this court and were raised only to preserve
them for further review.
The Government's opposition brief, filed on February 5,
agreed that Ibrahim's arguments were foreclosed by this court's
precedents. On February 7, the magistrate judge issued a status
report, noting that, under the Speedy Trial Act (STA), 18 U.S.C.
§ 3161, seventy days remained for the case to be tried.
On December 5, Ibrahim filed a second dismissal motion,
this one asserting a violation of the STA on the ground that 270
days of unexcluded time had elapsed (the STA motion).1 The
Government filed its opposition on December 16.
At a December 19 hearing, the district court denied both
the SORNA motion and the STA motion. On February 13, 2015, Ibrahim
entered a conditional guilty plea, reserving his right to appeal
the denials of both motions. He was sentenced to time served and
five years' supervised release.
II
The district court denied the SORNA motion because it
agreed with the parties that Ibrahim's constitutional challenges
had been directly rejected by panels of this court. As Ibrahim
1 On Ibrahim's view, detailed below, the SORNA motion
occasioned a maximum of thirty excludable days, running from the
February 7 status report until Sunday, March 9. Between Monday,
March 10 and the December 5 filing of the STA motion, 270 days
elapsed.
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says in his brief here, "he recognize[s] that panels of this
[c]ourt have rejected these arguments . . . and presents them here
because he believes those cases were wrongly decided and seeks to
preserve the issues for possible en banc review or review by the
Supreme Court."
By reference to our controlling precedents, we summarily
affirm the district court's rejection of the constitutional
challenges to the statute. See United States v. Whitlow, 714 F.3d
41, 44 (1st Cir. 2013) (collecting our cases rejecting arguments
that, in SORNA, Congress exceeded its Article I authority and
violated the nondelegation doctrine).
III
"This circuit reviews a denial of a statutory speedy
trial claim de novo as to legal rulings, and for clear error as to
factual findings." United States v. Carpenter, 781 F.3d 599, 616
(1st Cir. 2015). The STA requires that a defendant be tried within
seventy days of the later of the indictment or initial appearance.
See 18 U.S.C. § 3161(c)(1). In computing the seventy days,
however, § 3161(h)(1)(D)2 excludes "delay resulting from any
pretrial motion, from the filing of the motion through the
conclusion of the hearing on, or other prompt disposition of, such
motion."
2 What is now subparagraph (D) was formerly subparagraph (F),
as reflected in some of the cases cited herein.
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Here, on December 19, 2014, the district court held a
hearing on Ibrahim's SORNA motion. The time that by then had
elapsed since January 9, when Ibrahim filed the SORNA motion, was
excluded for purposes of the STA, and with this 344-day exclusion
there was no STA violation.3 Ibrahim responds with two arguments.
The first is that the statutory exclusion applies only when a
hearing is required, and that his SORNA motion required none.
Alternatively, he says that what transpired in court on December
19 was not really a hearing on the SORNA motion. Neither argument
is persuasive.
A
Assuming that the § 3161(h)(1)(D) exclusion is limited
to instances where hearings are required, we reiterate the
established principle that a district court's determination of
need for a particular hearing deserves substantial deference. In
United States v. Salimonu, 182 F.3d 63, 67-68 (1st Cir. 1999),
after a hiatus of some two-and-half years between the filing of a
motion and a hearing, the appellant contended that the trial court
erred in determining that a hearing was required. The district
court had specifically found that the motion was of a type for
3While we will explain that the delay between filing and
hearing the SORNA motion is excludable as a matter of STA law, it
is regrettable as a matter of judicial docket management. Better
district court practice would have set a hearing more
expeditiously.
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which, in its view, hearings should be held and had noted its
regular practice of holding hearings on them. Id. "This is a
sufficient indication," we held, "that a hearing was required."
Id. "[T]he district court is in a better position to determine
the necessity of a hearing than we are." Id.
In United States v. Maxwell, 351 F.3d 35 (1st Cir. 2003),
we reaffirmed our deference to the district court's determination
of necessity. There, we accepted the exclusion of pre-hearing
time "[e]ven though it took the court eight months to state on the
record," just before the filing of an STA motion, its decision
that the previously filed motion to sever required a hearing. Id.
at 39. "Our conclusion," we stressed, "is consistent with . . .
our reluctance to impugn the district court's regular, justified
practices." Id.
Our deferential position is not eccentric. "[A]ppellate
courts generally have been reluctant to question the judgment of
a district court that a hearing is required." United States v.
Dunn, 345 F.3d 1285, 1294 (11th Cir. 2003) (footnote omitted)
(citing, inter alia, United States v. Tannehill, 49 F.3d 1049,
1052 n.4 (5th Cir. 1995)); see also United States v. Smith, 569
F.3d 1209, 1213 (10th Cir. 2009) ("Even if the motions were weak
on the merits . . . there was no abuse of discretion in the trial
court's decision to have a hearing on them. . . . Perhaps a
hearing on [the] motions was not strictly speaking necessary to
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resolve them, but we will not second-guess the trial court's
decision to hold one."). Nor should these decisions engender
skepticism, for they rest on both permissible construction of the
statute, see Maxwell, 351 F.3d at 38, and sound concern for
practicality. More searching appellate enquiry into the necessity
of particular hearings would prove difficult and inevitably time
consuming to administer: so much depends on the specific motion
and the specific needs of the parties and district judge.
In brief, "we are loath to question the court's judgment
in this area absent obvious subterfuge." Salimonu, 182 F.3d at
68. This "obvious subterfuge" limitation on our deference is
shorthand for our stated refusal to "permit either the district
court or the prosecution to jerry-build a 'hearing' in order to
thwart the concinnous operation of the Speedy Trial Act." Id. at
68 n.1 (quoting United States v. Staula, 80 F.3d 596, 602 n.3 (1st
Cir. 1996)); see also Maxwell, 351 F.3d at 39 (same). But we do
not see that here. The district court noted that "[i]t is my
regular practice to have hearings on motions to dismiss in criminal
cases, and, if possible, decide them orally and then schedule
either a trial or a plea." And the advisability of departing from
standard practice did not appear compelling; Ibrahim, after all,
represented to the trial court that the SORNA motion presented
complex issues requiring an oversized brief. So we cannot say
that the district court engaged in obvious subterfuge, and we defer
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to its determination that a hearing on the SORNA motion was
required.
B
Ibrahim also argues that while the December 19, 2014
court session aired his STA motion, it did not function as a
hearing on the SORNA motion; and without a hearing on the SORNA
motion to trigger § 3161(h)(1)(D)'s time-exclusion, the motion
could, at most, have deserved § 3161(h)(1)(H)'s thirty-day
exclusion. See 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(1)(H) (excluding "delay
reasonably attributable to any period, not to exceed thirty days,
during which any proceeding concerning the defendant is actually
under advisement by the court").4 Excluding only thirty days would
not, of course, render Ibrahim's proceedings compliant with the
STA.
The STA does not define the word "hearing." But we have
understood it capaciously as "any on-the-record colloquy in which
the district court hears the arguments of counsel and considers
those arguments prior to deciding a pending motion." United States
v. Barnes, 159 F.3d 4, 12 (1st Cir. 1998) (quoting Staula, 80 F.3d
at 602). A hearing is "marked by oral argument, factual findings,
or legal rulings." Id.
4 What is now subparagraph (H) was formerly subparagraph (J).
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Here, the district court began the on-the-record
colloquy by saying, "We're here in connection with the hearing I
scheduled on the two motions to dismiss, one on constitutional
grounds, one on Speedy Trial Act grounds. They're intertwined."
It went on to say, "I'm prepared to hear about the merits of both
the motions and explain why, even though you acknowledge the First
Circuit has decided your constitutional issues, I really would
have had a hearing in any event, and I'll explain it in detail."
During defense counsel's remarks on the STA motion, the court
repeated, "I want to give you a chance to address the merits of
your underlying motion," and later asked defense counsel, "Is there
any more you'd like to say on the underlying constitutional
motion?" Counsel responded that she hoped her oversized brief was
sufficient, but reported that she had researched the case law in
advance of the hearing and confirmed that the state of the law as
represented in her brief had not changed.
Turning to the other side, the district court heard from
the Government on the SORNA motion when the prosecutor explained
that "no one disputes that these [constitutional] issues have been
decided by the First Circuit." Finally, the district court, on
the record, ruled, "The motion to dismiss based on constitutional
grounds is hereby denied."
In sum, the December 19 event included an "on-the-record
colloquy" in which the district court invited any further arguments
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of counsel for consideration before deciding the pending SORNA
motion by issuing a "legal ruling[]." Id. Contrary to Ibrahim's
protests, the character of the event was not qualitatively altered
simply because the Government was not asked any direct questions
about the SORNA motion, or because the district court indicated
that, had it not been burdened by STA constraints, it might have
made a written disposition of the constitutional issues.5
IV
The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.
5 Although the district court denied the STA motion, it stated
that, if it were to grant the motion, it would do so without
prejudice to reprosecution. Because we affirm the denial of the
motion, we need not reach Ibrahim's claim that a grant should have
been with prejudice.
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