DENVER (CN) — A Colorado man asked the 10th Circuit on Thursday to review the sentencing scheme that landed him in jail for three years, after he violated probation by sending a threatening email to a former CIA official.
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 them therapeutic, Moon Seals admitted to sending the messages, but said he didn’t intend to carry out any of the threats.
Weeks into serving his sentence, however, Moon Seals sent a new threat to a former CIA official, prompting Joe Biden-appointed U.S. Judge Charlotte Sweeney to resentence him to 36 months in prison with the comment: “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 the probation violation.
“If a district court is faithfully putting itself back in its shoes, it would be giving the functional equivalent of the original sentence, which was zero,” explained federal public defender Jacob Rasch-Chabot.
Barack Obama-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Phillips considered whether the lower court was locked into the original sentencing range, or whether it could calculate the sentence anew.
Rasch-Chabot said the court wasn’t required to give a sentence of zero, but had to pick up with the original sentencing range, which for probationary offenses is zero to six months.
“You’re punishing primarily for the breach of trust of the condition,” Rasch-Chabot said. “You’re not getting off scot-free for the original offense; in almost every case, you’re going to get supervision.”
Each original charge carried up to three years in prison, with a suggested sentence of 36 months total. On its own, the probation violation carried a three-to-nine-month sentence.
Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Murphy called the idea of a sentence of zero for the offense aspirational.
“That’s aspirational because that’s not where we are,” the Bill Clinton appointee said.
U.S. Attorney Jess Mekeel called the potential outcome absurd.
“If we’re sentencing anew, we’re going back in time, so we’re going to end up at the original sentencing range, and then we’re imposing a punishment for the violation,” Mekeel said. “If there’s no punishment effectively for the original offense, that’s absurd and I don’t think sentencing provisions should be read to be absurd.”
Rasch-Chabot also asked the panel to grant en banc review so he could formally challenge the 10th Circuit’s two-step scheme created in the 2022 ruling of U.S. v. Moore — a request denied on the briefs.
Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge Allison Eid rounded out the panel. The court held arguments on the second floor of the Byron White U.S. Courthouse in downtown Denver, but did not indicate when or how it would decide the case.