10th Circuit vacates 3-year sentence for man who threatened public officials

Malachi Mathias Moon Seals was sentenced to three years in prison for violating his probation after he sent a threatening message to a former CIA official.DENVER (CN) — In an 11-1 opinion with broad implications for probation sentencings, the en banc 10th Circuit on Friday vacated a three-year sentence given to a man who violated his probation by threatening public officials, remanding the case for resentencing under clarified guidelines.In a 23-page plurality opinion, U.S. Circuit Judge Timothy Tymkovich, a George W. Bush appointee, said the man should be sentenced “for the new conduct — the violation of probation” and not for both the violation and the underlying crime, as 10th Circuit precedent previously advised.From November 2021 to January 2022, then-18-year-old Malachi Mathias Moon Seals of Pueblo, Colorado, sent vulgar threats to several members of Congress and their families. After a grand jury indicted him on six counts of threatening a federal official and six counts of interstate communication of threats, Moon Seals pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years of probation.Calling the threats therapeutic, Moon Seals admitted to sending the messages but said he didn’t intend to carry out any of the threats.Days into serving his sentence, however, Moon Seals sent a new threat to a former CIA official. That prompted Joe Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney to resentence him to 36 months in prison, commenting: “You just simply cannot get this many chances to behave.”Moon Seals appealed, arguing the lower court erred in resentencing him for the original offense rather than simply calculating for the probation violation. A three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit affirmed his sentence last year, with U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Phillips penning the opinion.Moon Seals then requested en banc review, challenging the court’s use of a two-step sentencing scheme for probation violations. The scheme, from the 2022 10th Circuit case United States v. Moore, directed the court to first consider sentencing guidelines for the original offense, then calculate another term for the probation violation.The court heard oral arguments in May, where as Courthouse News previously reported, the judges considered revamping how the circuit handled sentencings for probation violations.On Friday, they did just that. Under the new rules, Tymkovich and the en banc 10th Circuit directed judges to only consider the original offense in deciding whether to vary from recommended sentence under the probation violation guidelines — a practice already used in other circuits.“Other circuits follow this straightforward reading,” Tymkovich noted.Ten circuit judges signed into the Tymkovich opinion. Among them were Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Jerome Holmes and U.S. Circuit Judge Harris Hartz, both George W. Bush appointees; Barack Obama-appointed U.S. Circuit Judges Scott Matheson, Robert Bacharach, Caroline McHugh and Nancy Moritz; Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Judges Joel Carson and Allison Eid; and Joe Biden-appointed U.S. Circuit Judges Veronica Rossman and Richard Federico.U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Phillips, an Obama appointee, was the lone dissenter. In a 58-page dissent, he argued the two-step scheme of Moore provided necessary “uniformity and proportionality” in keeping with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984.Under Friday’s decision, the Obama appointee wrote, “the majority returns us to the pre-1984 discretion-driven, disparity-ridden, hope-I-get-the-lenient-judge sentencing system.”“Thankfully, this wrong turn is limited to revocation of-probation situations," Phillips wrote. “But even that is a big, jagged chip of granite off this circuit’s previously smooth face of uniformity and proportionality for federal sentencings.”While vastly outnumbered in his view, Phillips wrote that he hoped “to catch the eye of any passerby with a wrecking ball and a cement mixer, perhaps the Supreme Court or the Sentencing Commission.”Federal public defender Jacob Rasch-Chabot represented Moon Seals on appeal, while U.S. attorney Ethan Sachs argued on behalf of the government. Neither party immediately responded to a request for comment.According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, 23-year-old Moon Seals was released from federal custody in April.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads