United States v. Brown

• Decision Date: 19 December 2013
• Docket Number: 12–4085.,Nos. 12–3952,s. 12–3952
• Citation: 740 F.3d 145
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellant in No. 12–3952 v. Blake BROWN, Jr., Appellant in No. 12–4085.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit

740 F.3d 145

UNITED STATES of America, Appellant in No. 12–3952

v.Blake BROWN, Jr., Appellant in No. 12–4085.

Nos. 12–3952, 12–4085.

United States Court of Appeals,Third Circuit.

Submitted Under Third Circuit

LAR 34.1(a) Dec. 19, 2013.

Filed: Jan. 15, 2014.

Donovan J. Cocas, Esq., Office of United States Attorney, Pittsburgh, PA, for the United States of America.

Lisa B. Freeland, Esq., Kimberly R. Brunson, Esq., Office of Federal Public Defender, Pittsburgh, PA, for Blake Brown, Jr.

Before: JORDAN, VANASKIE and GREENBERG, Circuit Judges.

OPINION OF THE COURT

JORDAN, Circuit Judge.

Both the government and the defendant, Blake Brown, Jr., appeal an order of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania dismissing the indictment of Brown for failing to register as a sex offender. For the reasons that follow, we will vacate the order and direct that the indictment be reinstated.

I. Background

The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (“SORNA”), 42 U.S.C. § 16901 et seq., requires individuals convicted of certain sex crimes to submit identifying information to state and federal sex offender registries. §§ 16912(a), 16913–16914, 16919(a). It is a violation of SORNA for such individuals to travel in “interstate or foreign commerce” and “knowingly fail [ ] to register or update a registration.” 18 U.S.C. § 2250(a). While the term “sex offender” is tautologically defined as someone who has been convicted of a “sex offense,” 42 U.S.C. § 16911(1), Congress was careful to delineate specific circumstances in which a conviction involving sex will not lead to classification as an offender under SORNA. Among other things, ¹

[a]n offense involving consensual sexual conduct is not a sex offense for the purposes of [SORNA] ... if the victim was at least 13 years old and the offender was not more than 4 years older than the victim.

42 U.S.C. § 16911(5)(C) (emphasis added). That exception is the pivot on which this case turns.

In August 2011, Brown was charged with failing to register under SORNA based on his 2003 conviction for third degree lewd molestation in violation of Florida Statute § 800.04(5). Although he had previously registered when he moved from Florida to New York, he failed to register after he later moved to Pennsylvania in October 2010. At the time of his arrest, he was staying with his father in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and admitted knowing that he needed to register, though he claimed he “did not have the time” to do so. (PSR ¶ 43.)

Brown pled guilty as charged, but, when it came time for sentencing, the District Court sua sponte raised various concerns regarding SORNA's applicability. In particular, the Court expressed doubt that Brown was indeed a “sex offender,” given that—according to the U.S. Probation Office's Presentence Investigation Report—he was 17 years old and his victim was 13 years old at the time they engaged in the consensual sexual contact that was the basis of Brown's 2003 conviction.² As the Court saw it, giving Brown the benefit of SORNA's “not more than 4 years older” exception was “a question of ... the interests of justice.” (App. at 203.) The Court therefore decided to withdraw its previous approval of Brown's guilty plea.³

Although the government and Brown eventually stipulated that Brown's “date of birth was exactly four years and four months (52 months) prior to the date of birth of the victim in the offense of Lewd Molestation” (Supp.App. at 50–51), the District Court, in an order dismissing the indictment,⁴ held that the exception in 42 U.S.C. § 16911(5)(C) is “grievous[ly]” ambiguous as applied to Brown (App. at 149). According to the Court, a “colloquial” reading would render Brown eligible for the exception in the statute since, “[t]he common question, ‘how old are you?’ is colloquially interpreted to mean, ‘how many complete years have transpired since the date of your birth?’ ” ( Id. at 147 & n. 2.) Because Brown was 17 years old and the victim was 13 years old at the time of the incident, the Court reasoned that Brown could be seen as falling within the exception since he was not “more than 4 years older than the victim,” but rather was exactly four years older.

At the same time, the Court acknowledged that Brown indeed “ was more than four years older than the victim because he was born more than four years before the victim.” ( Id. at 147–48.) Math would therefore seem to dictate that Brown could not claim the exception, but, the Court said, if “Congress [had] intended for such a strict measurement of age to apply (particularly in the context of comparing two people's relative ages), Congress could have defined the difference in reference to months.” ( Id. at 5.) Because Congress did not specify how “years” were to be calculated, and because resort to legislative history did not clarify what was meant by the word “years,” the Court applied the rule of lenity to dismiss the indictment.⁵

The government timely appealed the dismissal, and Brown filed a cross-appeal seeking to preserve a variety of issues.⁶

II. Discussion ⁷

The dispositive question before us is what is meant by the word “years” in 42 U.S.C. § 16911(5)(C). The District Court decided that the use in that statute of the phrase “more than 4 years older than the victim” is “susceptible to more than one reasonable interpretation” (App. at 3), but we disagree.

“[T]he starting point for interpreting a statute is the language of the statute itself.” Consumer Prod. Safety Comm'n v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 447 U.S. 102, 108, 100 S.Ct. 2051, 64 L.Ed.2d 766 (1980). When words are not defined within the statute, we construe them “in accordance with [their] ordinary or natural meaning.” FDIC v. Meyer, 510 U.S. 471, 476, 114 S.Ct. 996, 127 L.Ed.2d 308 (1994). We do not, however, do so blindly.

[F]requently words of general meaning are used in a statute ... and yet a consideration of the whole legislation, or of the circumstances surrounding its enactment, or of the absurd results which follow from giving such broad meaning to the words, makes it unreasonable to believe that the legislator intended to include the particular act.

Holy Trinity Church v. United States, 143 U.S. 457, 459, 12 S.Ct. 511, 36 L.Ed. 226 (1892). In such cases, resorting to dictionary definitions may be helpful. See MCI Telecomm. Corp. v. Am. Tel. & Tel. Co., 512 U.S. 218, 225, 114 S.Ct. 2223, 129 L.Ed.2d 182 (1994) (stating, based on “[v]irtually every dictionary,” that “ ‘to modify’ means to change moderately or in minor fashion”). Ultimately, though, “[a]mbiguity is a creature not of definitional possibilities but of statutory context,” Brown v. Gardner, 513 U.S. 115, 118, 115 S.Ct. 552, 130 L.Ed.2d 462 (1994), so the touchstone of statutory analysis should, again, be the statute itself.

As already noted, § 16911(5)(C) provides that an offense involving consensual sexual conduct is not a sex offense under SORNA as long as the victim “was at least 13 years old and the offender was not more than 4 years older than the victim.” 42 U.S.C. § 16911(5)(C). In common usage, a year means 365 consecutive days (except, of course, when a leap year adds a day) or 12 months. See, e.g., Black's Law Dictionary 1754 (9th ed. 2009) (“A consecutive 365–day period beginning at any point.”). We therefore conclude that the term “4 years” is not ambiguous: it is quite precisely 1,461 days ⁸ or 48 months. While the word “years” on its own or in some colloquial usage could perhaps be thought ambiguous, the word is not floating in abstract isolation or casual conversation here; it is set in the specific terms of a specific statute, and it has a discernible meaning in that context. “[M]ore than 4 years” means anything in excess of 1,461 days.

Considering “years” to mean whole years only, as the District Court suggests, would lead to strange results in the application of SORNA. The government rightly notes that using the “ ‘colloquial method’ of calculating whether an offender was ‘more than 4 years older’ than his victim would create alternating windows of time” in which the same offense involving the same two participants “sometimes would require registration under SORNA and sometimes [would] not, depending upon the time of the year their sexual congress took place.” (Gov't's Opening Br. at 20.) In other words, if we take Brown's Florida offense as an example and we were to assume that Brown's date of birth was May 1, 1984, and his victim's date of birth was September 1, 1988—exactly four years and four months later—Brown would only need to register under SORNA if he had been convicted of having sexual contact with her at any point between May 1st through August 31st of any year between 2002 and 2004, when he was “colloquially” five years older, but he would not need to register for a conviction involving the same conduct at other times.⁹ That cannot be the law.

The District Court expressed concern that considering “4 years” literally as an accumulation of lesser units of time could “require a calculation down to the month, day, hour, minute, or even second in order to calculate the difference in age between a defendant and victim.” (App. at 5 (footnote omitted).) But demanding some precision—at least as to days ¹⁰—is more sound than the conclusion that no one is “more than 4 years older” than someone else unless he is actually five years older.

Because the words “no more than 4 years older” have a clearly discernible meaning here, applying the rule of lenity was not necessary. We have held that the “simple existence of some statutory ambiguity ... is not sufficient to warrant application of the rule of lenity, for most statutes are ambiguous to some degree.” United States v. Kouevi, 698 F.3d 126, 138 (3d Cir.2012) (quoting Dean v. United States, 556 U.S. 568, 577, 129 S.Ct. 1849, 173 L.Ed.2d 785 (2009)) (internal quotation marks omitted) superseded on other grounds.

Rather, the rule only applies in those cases “in which a...