How Do Federal Judges Let You Know When They're Annoyed?

Great reference.

This is how federal judges let their displeasure be known. Not with petitions or protests, but with snippily worded decisions. And in the case of Ninth Circuit Judge John Owens, it’s served with a side of pop culture.

Take Judge Owens’s recent concurrence in the case of U.S. v. Perez-Silvan. The case is an appeal of the sentence for illegal reentry after deportation, and Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain’s majority opinion does the hard work of working through the applicable standards. This leaves Owen’s concurrence to call out the overly complicated sentencing guidelines:

I fully join Judge O’Scannlain’s opinion, which faithfully applies controlling law to the question at hand. But what a bad hand it is – requiring more than 16 pages to resolve an advisory question. I applaud the United States Sentencing Commission for reworking U.S.S.G. § 2L1.2 to spare judges, lawyers, and defendants from the wasteland of Descamps. See U.S.S.G. supp. app. C, amend. 802 (2016); U.S.S.G. § 2L1.2(b) (2016). I continue to urge the Commission to simplify the Guidelines to avoid the frequent sentencing adventures more complicated than reconstructing the Staff of Ra in the Map Room to locate the Well of the Souls. Cf. Almanza-Arenas v. Lynch, 815 F.3d 469, 482–83 (9th Cir. 2016) (en banc) (Owens, J., concurring); Raiders of the Lost Ark (Paramount Pictures 1981).

If you’ve forgotten just how complicated a process locating the Well of the Souls is (or if you have an Indiana Jones-sized hole in your pop culture literacy), you should enjoy the clip below.


headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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