UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. ANDREW F. GALO,
No. 99-3870
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT
February 6, 2001
2001 Decisions, Paper 21
Before: GREENBERG and McKEE, Circuit Judges, and GARTH, Senior Circuit Judge
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Criminal No. 99-cr-05000. District Judge: Hon. Alan N. Bloch. Argued: May 9, 2000. * Honorable Morton I. Greenberg assumed Senior Status on June 30, 2000.
HARRY LITMAN, ESQ. United States Attorney BONNIE R. SCHLUETER, ESQ. Asst. United States Attorney MARY BETH BUCHANAN, ESQ. (Argued) Asst. United States Attorney 633 U. S. Post Office & Courthouse Pittsburgh, PA 15219 Attorneys for Appellee
OPINION OF THE COURT
McKEE, Circuit Judge.
Andrew Galo appeals the sentence that was imposed following his conditional plea of guilty to production of material depicting the sexual exploitation of children, in violation of
I. FACTUAL BACKGROUND.
In 1996, Galo was in a relationship with Sheila H. She had a young daughter whom we will refer to as Jessica H. Jessica H. had previously been sexually abused by one of her mother‘s boyfriends. That abuse caused Children and Youth Services (“CYS“) to temporarily remove Jessica from her home. She had been placed back in her home before or during Galo‘s relationship with her mother.
At some point, Galo persuaded Sheila H. to permit Jessica H., then thirteen years old, to spend a night at his apartment. Galo accomplished this by threatening to tell CYS that Sheila H. had previously permitted Jessica H. to have contact with him. This would have jeopardized Sheila‘s custody of her daughter because Galo had a state criminal record, the nature of which we discuss below. Sheila knew that Jessica should not have been permitted to be in Galo‘s company without supervision because of Galo‘s background. Galo also threatened to have the utilities at Sheila H.‘s residence turned off unless Jessica spent time with him. The utilities were registered in his name. In addition to threats and coercion, Galo also cajoled Sheila by telling her that he might one day be Jessica‘s step-father, and suggesting that he and Jessica therefore needed time to get acquainted.
On the evening of March 1, 1999 Jessica did stay with Galo. During her visit he took approximately 21 sexually explicit nude photographs of her after instructing her to pose nude and expose her genitals. Jessica knew that Galo had a temper and she was therefore apparently too afraid to resist or refuse.
Galo took the undeveloped film containing these photographs to an Eckerd Drug Store for processing. However, the photo manager there stopped processing the film and alerted police as soon as she discovered the sexually explicit nature of the photographs. Police responded and arrested Galo when he returned to pick-up the developed photographs. Initially Galo told the police
II. PROCEDURAL HISTORY.
On April 6, 1999, a federal grand jury charged Galo in a two count indictment. Count One charged him with production of material depicting the sexual exploitation of children, in violation of
On July 29, 1999, the district court denied Galo‘s motion to dismiss the indictment and Galo immediately entered a conditional plea of guilty to both counts of the indictment. He preserved the following issues for appeal:
- Whether Title 18, United States Code, Section 2251(a) is a valid exercise of the authority granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause.
- Whether the evidence supporting the jurisdictional element of Title 18, United States Code, Section 2251(a) is sufficient under the Commerce Clause.
- Whether Title 18, United States Code, Section 2252(a)(4)(B) is a valid exercise of the authority granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause.
- Whether the evidence supporting the jurisdictional element of Title 18, United States Code, Section 2252(a)(4)(B) is sufficient under the Commerce Clause.
The court accepted Galo‘s plea and thereafter requested that Galo and the government file briefs addressing whether Galo‘s prior state convictions would subject him to the mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years, contained in This appeal followed. As noted above, Galo pled guilty to violating Any person who employs, uses, persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any minor to engage in, . . . any sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct, shall be punished as provided under subsection (d), if such person knows or has reason to know that such visual depiction will be transported in interstate or foreign commerce or mailed, if that visual depiction was produced using materials that have been mailed, shipped, or transported in interstate or foreign (a) Any person who . . . (4) either . . . (B) knowingly possesses 1 or more books, magazines, periodicals, films, video tapes, or other matter which contain any visual depiction that has been mailed, or has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce, or which was produced using materials which have been mailed or so shipped or transported by any means including computer, if -- (i) the producing of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and (ii) such visual depiction is of such conduct; shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section. As we explained in Rodia, “[a] jurisdictional element [or hook] . . . refers to a provision in a federal statute that In Rodia we concluded that the jurisdictional hook of Galo argues that Rodia was incorrectly decided because we ignored the reality that Congress had criminalized purely intrastate, local activity. However, despite Galo‘s argument to the contrary, we were well aware that the statute “criminaliz[ed] an activity that is not directly linked to interstate commerce.” Id. at 468. However, as we noted there, the fact that purely local activity is criminalized is not fatal to the statute. The precise question before us is whether it was within Congress‘s power under the Commerce Clause to enact Id. at 468. Rodia answers the inquiry in the affirmative and Galo‘s attack on the constitutionality of the statute is therefore to no avail. His assertion that the statute is unconstitutional as applied to him is also without merit as our analysis in Rodia clearly shows that Congress could properly regulate intrastate possession of child pornography produced by materials that had traveled in interstate commerce.3 Consequently, we will affirm the judgment of conviction. Galo‘s challenge to the district court‘s sentencing enhancement is more troubling. Any individual who violates . . . this section shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not less than ten (10) years nor more than twenty (20) years, but if such person has one prior conviction under this chapter [ Galo‘s enhancement is based upon two guilty pleas he entered in state court in 1990. In January of that year Galo‘s niece told New Kensington, Pennsylvania police that Galo had been sexually abusing her from her preschool years up to fifth grade. According to the niece, the abuse initially consisted of vaginal touching, but it progressed to oral sex and intercourse. The abuse stopped when the niece told her mother. However, she also told police that Galo had sexually abused her brothers. The police subsequently questioned her brothers, and they confirmed that Galo had also sexually abused them. Galo‘s older nephew, then age 18, told police that Galo had been sexually abusing him for the past six years. The abuse consisted of oral and anal sex, and touching of each other‘s genitals. Galo‘s younger nephew, then age 16, told the police that Galo had sexually abused him at various times from the time he was 6 to the time he reached 13. That abuse also consisted of oral sex and touching of genitalia. On February 16, 1990, Galo was charged in the Court of Common Pleas of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, with two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, two counts of corruption of minors, two counts of endangering the welfare of children and four counts of indecent assault. On March 16, 1991, Galo appeared before a state trial judge and pled guilty to corruption of minors, endangering the welfare of children and indecent assault. Charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse were dropped pursuant to a plea agreement. The court accepted the plea and sentenced Galo to one and one-half to three years imprisonment. When Galo was finally released from custody on that sentence he began his parole. As a condition of that parole he was required to complete a sexual offender program and he was prohibited from residing in a home where minors were present. He was on parole when he became involved with Sheila. Galo now argues that the district court incorrectly concluded that he had been convicted of violating state laws “relating to the sexual exploitation of children,” as required to enhance his sentence. He insists that the district court was required to follow a “categorical approach” in deciding whether the enhancement provisions of sentencing court can look only to the fact of conviction and the statutory definition of the prior offense. The court‘s analysis is not controlled by the conduct giving rise to the conviction. Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575, 600-602 (1990). In Taylor, the defendant conditionally pled guilty to being a convicted felon-in-possession of a firearm in violation of (1) In the case of a person who violates section 922(g) of this title and has three previous convictions by any court . . . for a violent felony . . . such person shall be fined not more than $25,000 and imprisoned not less than fifteen years. . . . (2) As used in this subsection-- . . . . . “(B) the term `violent felony’ means any crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year . . . that-- “(i) has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another; or “(ii) is burglary [or other specified offenses] or otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another. Id. at 578. Taylor conceded that his prior convictions for assault and robbery counted toward the enhancement because they involved the use of physical force against persons. However, he argued that the district court could not rely upon two burglary convictions in deciding if he qualified for an enhanced sentence under The issue before the Supreme Court was whether a sentencing court applying the only plausible interpretation of Id., at 602. The Court also noted that the “practical difficulties and potential unfairness of a factual approach are daunting [because] [i]n all cases where the Government alleges that the defendant‘s actual conduct fit the generic definition of burglary, the trial court would have to determine what that conduct was.” Id., at 601. Although a factual approach would be possible in some cases where the charging instrument disclosed the actual theories of the case as presented to the jury, it would often not be possible to discern the nature of a defendant‘s prior conduct. Application of the enhancement in such instances would therefore result in inequitable treatment from state to state or even within a given jurisdiction based only upon the specificity of the charging instrument or the availability of the jury instructions, or trial transcript. Such difficulties are avoided where a sentencing court applying the This categorical approach has not been limited to the enhancement under The language of the relevant statute here is even clearer than the text of the statutes involved in Taylor and Roussos. As noted above, In his thoughtful dissent, Judge Garth reminds us that in United States v. Watkins, 54 F.3d 163 (3rd Cir. 1995), we noted that the enhancement contained in when the “statutory definition of the prior offense” is broad enough to permit conviction based on conduct that falls outside of the scope of 54 F.3d at 166. However, that pronouncement referred to the Supreme Court‘s discussion of situations where a state statute is so broad that it encompasses offenses that serve as predicates for enhancement under a person has been convicted of burglary for purposes of a Id. at 599. When a given state statute defined burglary more narrowly than generic burglary (such as not requiring the intent to commit a felony or a violent crime following entry) there was clearly no problem as the prior conviction must, by definition, include the elements of generic burglary. However, some states define burglary to include unprivileged entry of a vehicle. In such cases the prior conviction would not necessarily satisfy the elements of generic burglary. However, in such a case, if the defendant had actually been convicted of entering a building, he/she would have committed a generic burglary even though the statute‘s definition included conduct that could not serve as an enhancement under A few States’ burglary statutes, . . . define burglary more broadly, e.g., by eliminating the requirement that the entry be unlawful, or by including places, such as automobiles and vending machines, other than buildings. . . . Also, there may be offenses under some States’ laws that, while not called “burglary,” correspond in substantial part to generic burglary. . . . This question requires us to address a more general issue--whether the sentencing court in applying Id. at 600 (citations omitted). It was in this context that we made our pronouncement in Watkins. Watkins argued that the prosecution‘s reliance upon documentary evidence to establish that his prior state convictions qualified as enhancements under Here, the information provided in the presentence report enabled the district court to ascertain with certainty the statutes of conviction and the statutes of conviction encompass only conduct that falls within the scope of Watkins, 54 F.3d at 167-8 (emphasis added). However, our discussion in Watkins can not be divorced from the focus of the Supreme Court‘s inquiry in Taylor. There, the Court had to discern what Congress intended when it amended the applicable statute in 1986. When The legislative history as a whole suggests that the deletion of the 1984 definition of burglary may have been an inadvertent casualty of a complex drafting process. In any event, there is nothing in the history to show that Congress intended in 1986 to replace the 1984 “generic” definition of burglary with something entirely different. Although the omission of a pre-existing definition of a term often indicates Congress’ intent to reject that definition, we draw no such inference here. Id. at 589-90 (citations omitted). Having established that a burglary, as originally defined, remained a predicate offense, the Court held that sentencing courts must adopt the “categorical approach” in determining if a state conviction for burglary constituted a “burglary” for purposes of We are similarly unpersuaded by the dissent‘s reliance upon United States v. Sweeten, 933 F.2d 765, 769 (9th Cir. 1991), and United States v. Barney. 955 F.2d 635 (10th Cir. 1992). See dissent at 27. In Sweeten, the district court refused to count a prior conviction for “burglary of a habitation” in Texas as a predicate offense under Similarly, in Barney, the defendant had been convicted under a Wyoming statute that defined burglary to include unauthorized entry into “a building, occupied structure or vehicle,” with the intent of committing a crime. 955 F.2d at 638.5 The court of appeals upheld the sentencing court‘s In determining whether a person has been convicted of a crime which may be counted toward enhancement under Taylor, a court must employ a “categorical approach,” rather than inquire into underlying facts. This requires a comparison of the elements of the relevant state statute with the basic elements of burglary identified in the Taylor decision. 955 F.2d at 638 (citations omitted). The court‘s holding was based upon the fact that “Taylor allows `the sentencing court to go beyond the mere fact of conviction in a narrow range of cases where a jury was actually required to find all the elements of generic burglary.’ ” Id. at 639 (quoting Taylor, 110 S.Ct. at 2160). Our situation is quite different. As noted above, the statute that governs Galo‘s enhancement requires a “prior conviction of . . . laws . . . relating to the sexual exploitation of children.” Therefore the enhancement is governed by whether the law the defendant previously violated relates to “sexual exploitation of children.” Section 2251(d) does not require a sentencing court to determine if the prior conviction satisfies the generic elements of a crime as does Section 2251(d) incorporates the categorical approach because it focuses the sentencing court‘s attention on the statutory definition of a prior conviction. It is the elements of a given statute, not the conduct that violates it that determines if the statute relates to sexual exploitation of children. We conclude, therefore, that the district court erred when it considered Galo‘s prior conduct in determining whether he was subject to the Accordingly, we must examine the statutory definitions of the crimes Galo was previously convicted of and determine whether they are state “laws . . . relating to the sexual exploitation of children.” As recited earlier, Galo‘s state convictions were for two counts each of : (1) Corruption of Minors in violation of Corruption of Minors is defined as follows: Whoever, being of the age of 18 years and upwards, by any act corrupts or tends to corrupt the morals of any minor less than 18 years of age, or who aids, abets, entices or encourages any such minor in the commission of any crime, or who knowingly assists or encourages such minor in violating his or her parole or any order of court, commits a misdemeanor of the first degree. In deciding what conduct can be said to corrupt the morals of a minor, the common sense of the community, as well as the sense of decency, propriety and the morality which most people entertain is sufficient to apply the statute to each particular case, and to individuate what particular conduct is rendered criminal by it. Commonwealth v. Decker, 698 A.2d 99, 101 (Pa. Super. 1997) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Commonwealth v. Tau Kappa Epsilon, 530 Pa. 416 (1992) (fraternities prosecuted for corrupting the morals of minors based upon underage drinking). Endangering the Welfare of a Child is defined as follows: A parent, guardian, or other person supervising the welfare of a child under 18 years of age commits an offense if he knowingly endangers the welfare of the child by violating a duty of care, protection or support. Indecent assault is a much closer call, because it obviously relates to the sexual nature of an offender‘s conduct. However, it criminalizes, and relates to, nonconsensual indecent touching regardless of the victim‘s age. Pennsylvania law establishes that this offense is committed when [a] person who has indecent contact6 with the complainant or causes the complainant to have indecent contact with the person is guilty of indecent assault if: (1) the person does so without the complainant‘s consent; (2) the person does so by forcible compulsion; . . . . The government argues that applying the categorical approach would produce an “absurd result” because “the enhanced penalty provisions of In sum, because Galo has not previously been convicted for violating a law relating to the sexual exploitation of children, the district court improperly applied the For all of the above reasons, we reject Galo‘s constitutional challenge to I am obliged to write separately because, even though I agree with the majority‘s disposition of Galo‘s first three issues on appeal,1 I disagree strongly with its failure to recognize that the District Court‘s enhancement of Galo‘s sentence should be approved and, therefore, affirmed. Galo complains that his sentence was improperly enhanced by the District Court because, claims Galo, he did not suffer a state (Pennsylvania) conviction for sexually exploiting children.2 Unfortunately, the majority of this panel has agreed with him by narrowly construing Galo had been indicted in 1990 in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania on a ten-count information which charged him with corruption of minors,3 endangering the welfare of Thereafter, in 1999, Galo was charged in a two-count indictment in federal court with the production of material depicting the sexual exploitation of children. The majority, in its opinion, has detailed that indictment and has described Galo‘s prior sexual abuse of his niece from preschool years to fifth grade. As the majority opinion has noted, Galo‘s abuse of his niece included vaginal touching, oral sex, and intercourse. His earlier abuse of his nephews included oral and anal sex and touching their genitals. These acts of Galo have never been denied, have never been contradicted, and, as I have recited above, Galo never objected to their inclusion in the presentence report that was prepared in connection with his federal indictment. Indeed, the plea colloquies conducted both by the District Court judge and by Judge Ackerman in the Court of Common Pleas of Westmoreland County not only flesh out the actions taken by Galo relating to his explicit sexual conduct with his nephews and niece, but also inform Galo in great detail of the criminal consequences to which he was subject in terms of sentence for those actions. I stress this point because, as I understand the majority opinion, it holds that, despite Galo‘s explicit admissions of his acts through his pleas of guilty, the statutory definitions of the crimes of which Galo was convicted are claimed not to be specifically related to the sexual First, I believe that the majority has erred in interpreting the term “relating to” as narrowly as it did. Second, the majority has failed to recognize that the gravamen of the Supreme Court‘s decision in Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575 (1990), was that no court should be called upon to conduct fact finding with respect to the prior state indictments, nor should sentencing courts ignore undisputed facts in connection with prior state convictions. Third, the majority has also failed to recognize that this Court and several of our sister Circuits have interpreted Taylor to permit sentencing courts to review prior guilty pleas and the descriptions of prior convictions in presentence reports in order to determine the nature of a prior conviction for sentencing enhancement purposes. Thus, the sentencing court is not confined to the mechanistic reading of a statute which, as the majority apparently contends, must contain the relevant “magic terms” (in our case, “sexual exploitation of children“). Rather, as both Taylor7 and the cases I discuss below instruct us, we can look beyond the words of the statute giving rise to the enhanced sentence. Though the Supreme Court intended to foreclose the need for mini-trials for sentencing courts to determine the elements of a prior conviction, because it did not desire “the sentencing court to engage in an elaborate factfinding Several Circuit courts have interpreted the Supreme Court‘s decision in Taylor. In United States v. Sweeten, in which the district court had enhanced the defendant‘s sentence under Accordingly, the Ninth Circuit held in Sweeten that it was proper to consider the defendant‘s plea of guilty to the Texas conviction and his indictment, because “[c]onsideration of these additional documents, when proffered by the government at sentencing, does not require any searching inquiry into the underlying facts of a defendant‘s conviction.” 933 F.2d at 769. Therefore, held the Ninth Circuit, “it is error for a district court . . . to restrict its consideration to the original judgment of conviction and corresponding criminal statute if also presented with documentation or judicially noticeable facts that clearly establish that the conviction is a predicate conviction for enhancement purposes.” Sweeten, 933 F.2d at 769-70. The Tenth Circuit considered a similar issue in connection with a where enhancement is sought on the basis of a conviction obtained through a guilty plea, the sentencing court may look to the underlying indictment or information and the text of the guilty plea to determine whether the defendant was charged with Finally, in United States v. Watkins, this Court considered application of the when the “statutory definition of the prior offense” is broad enough to permit conviction based on conduct that falls outside of the scope of 54 F.3d at 166. Of even greater significance, we noted that “[i]t is well established in this circuit, and all others, that a sentencing court may rely on the facts set forth in the presentence report when their accuracy is not challenged by the defendant.” Watkins, 54 F.3d at 166-67. Applying Taylor and its progeny to this case, I would hold that the sentencing court properly looked at the state court plea colloquy to determine whether the prior convictions were “relating to the sexual exploitation of children.” All three of the Pennsylvania statutes under which Galo was previously convicted are broad enough to include “sexual exploitation of children,” depending on the underlying facts, as set forth in the state court information, Galo‘s two guilty Finally, Let me revisit the relevant proceedings in the Court of Common Pleas and in the District Court for a moment. In the plea colloquy in state court, the state court judge explained: “Now I‘m going to explain the counts to which you will be pleading guilty. And you will notice that this is what the Commonwealth would be required to prove if you pled not guilty. This is what you are admitting by pleading to these charges.” He then outlined four elements that the Commonwealth would have to prove before Galo could be convicted of the two counts of corruption of minors, The state court judge set forth three elements for the two counts of endangering the welfare of children, Finally, the state court judge explained that indecent assault, By the terms of the plea colloquy, Galo pled guilty to these eight counts in state court involving “indecent contact,” i.e., “sexual exploitation,” with children. Additionally, the presentence report described Galo‘s state court conviction under prior convictions. The presentence report stated that Galo was charged in state court after his niece informed the New Kensington police that Galo had been sexually abusing her brothers (his nephews), and the police interviewed the two nephews. According to the presentence report and as I noted earlier, the abuse of the elder nephew “consisted of oral and/or anal sex and touching of each other‘s penis,” and the abuse of the younger nephew “consisted of touching each other‘s penis and later of oral sex.” Because of the broad nature of the Pennsylvania statutes under which Galo was convicted, the District Court properly conducted further inquiry under Taylor and determined that, in Galo‘s case, the offenses to which he pled guilty in state court related to “sexual exploitation of children.” The District Court‘s decision to apply the sentencing enhancement to Galo‘s sentence was well in line with Supreme Court precedent and precedent from this and other Circuits. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent from the majority‘s failure to affirm the District Court‘s enhanced sentence of Galo. A True Copy: Teste: Clerk of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third CircuitIII. DISCUSSION.
A. Constitutional Challenge to
B. Sentence Enhancement Pursuant to
IV.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
