Turtle Talk

Here is the opinion in United States v. Begay (8-3).

The panel decision that vacated a first-degree murder conviction for insufficiency of evidence of premeditation is here.

The three judges that dissented from the reversal, under Judge Reinhardt’s byline, write:

This is a case in which there is no conflict among circuits, no intra-circuit conflict, and no issue of national importance.The court went en banc not over any legal issue, but only to decide whether a few specific facts identified in the majority opinion were sufficient to warrant a finding of premeditation.A similar combination of facts is not likely to occur again in a future case, especially as there are few federal murder cases—this one happened on an Indian reservation—and even fewer in which the question whether the murder was first- or second-degree hinges exclusively on whether there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to prove premeditation. Nevertheless, a majority of this court decided that it was worthy of en banc review when the three-judge panel found that the prosecution had failed to prove murder in the first as opposed to  second degree. Because I disagree with the majority that the minimal facts that it sets forth in its opinion are sufficient to establish premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt, whatever reasonable inferences may be drawn, I dissent.