Highlighting Justice Gorsuch's interesting concurrence in Hicks on the perils of permitting sentencing error to persist

Adam Liptak has this effective new article in the New York Times about the effectiveness of the new Justice on the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. The article is headlined "Confident and Assertive, Gorsuch Hurries to Make His Mark," and it develops the point that Justice Gorsuch's "early opinions were remarkably self-assured." The article and that line reminded me that I have been meaning to highlight Justice Gorsuch's remarkable little concurrence on the final day of the term in the Hicks v. US, No. 16-7806 (S. Ct. June 26, 2017) (available here).

Hicks is a quirky case in a quirky posture after the defendant was sentenced under the wrong crack sentencing law during the transitional uncertainty after the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act. The government admits in its briefing to SCOTUS that Hicks' 20-year mandatory-minimum sentence was legally erroneous, but the government asked SCOTUS to remand the case to the Fifth Circuit to conduct the full plain error analysis. The Supreme Court did just that via a short order, but the Chief Justice joined by Justice Thomas dissented with a short opinion suggesting that SCOTUS should make a plain error decision before being willing to vacate the judgment below. This dissent, it seems, prompted Judge Gorsuch to want to defend the Court's action and in so doing he had a lot of interesting things to say. These passages from the end of his concurrence in particular caught my attention:

A plain legal error infects this judgment—a man was wrongly sentenced to 20 years in prison under a defunct statute.  No doubt, too, there’s a reasonable probability that cleansing this error will yield a different outcome.  Of course, Mr. Hicks’s conviction won’t be undone, but the sentencing component of the district court’s judgment is likely to change, and change substantially. For experience surely teaches that a defendant entitled to a sentence consistent with 18 U.S.C. §3553(a)’s parsimony provision, rather than pursuant to the rigors of a statutory mandatory minimum, will often receive a much lower sentence.  So there can be little doubt Mr. Hicks’s substantial rights are, indeed, implicated.  Cf. Molina-Martinez v. United States, 578 U. S. ___, ___ (2016).  When it comes to the fourth prong of plain error review, it’s clear Mr. Hicks also enjoys a reasonable probability of success.  For who wouldn’t hold a rightly diminished view of our courts if we allowed individuals to linger longer in prison than the law requires only because we were unwilling to correct our own obvious mistakes?  Cf. United States v. Sabillon-Umana, 772 F.3d 1328, 1333 (CA10 2014).

Now this Court has no obligation to rove about looking for errors to correct in every case in this large country, and I agree with much in Justice Scalia’s dissent in Nunez v. United States, 554 U.S. 911, 911–913 (2008), suggesting caution..... But, respectfully, I am unaware of any such reason here.  Besides, if the only remaining objection to vacating the judgment here is that, despite our precedent routinely permitting the practice, we should be wary of remanding a case without first deciding for ourselves the latter elements of the plain error test, that task is so easily done that in this case that I cannot think why it should not be done. Indeed, the lone peril in the present case seems to me the possibility that we might permit the government to deny someone his liberty longer than the law permits only because we refuse to correct an obvious judicial error.

Based on Justice Gorsuch's votes in a few other criminal cases, early indications suggest that he is far more often going to vote in favor of the government rather than in favor of criminal defendants across the range of criminal law and procedure cases.  But his decision to write separately in this little case to push back at the dissenters here with this particular language leads me to wonder if Justice Gorsuch (like the Justice he replaced) might prove to be an especially interesting and unpredictable vote and voice in federal sentencing cases in particular.