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DENVER (CN) — The 10th Circuit on Friday affirmed an increased sentence for a man who threatened a government official while on probation for threatening other government officials.
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 such as “shov[ing] my rusty machete into their tight little throats and twist[ing] like a fork in some pumkin mush.”
Weeks into serving his sentence, however, Moon Seals sent a new threat to a former CIA official, prompting Joe Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney to resentence him to three years in prison with the comment: “You just simply cannot get this many chances to behave.”
Moon Seals’ probation-breaking threat called his target a “pathetic fucking n—er ch–k camel toed sand eating shit monkey.”
Moon Seals appealed, arguing the lower court erred in resentencing him for the original offense rather than simply calculating the probation violation.
Moon Seals first asked the 10th Circuit to revisit its decision in the 2024 case U.S. v. Moore , which specified a method of recalculating sentences following probation violations after a bank robber had been sentenced to 84 months in prison following a probation violation. In Moore , the 10th Circuit found the lower court had inappropriately “locked itself” into the higher sentence instead of completing a new calculation.
Moon Seals also argued the lower court misapplied Moore in his case and asked the three-judge panel for a second look.
“He argues more specifically that the district court plainly erred by not applying a 0-month sentence at Moore I ’s first step, and in doing so prejudiced him,” U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Phillips said in a 14-page opinion.
“But he fails to show that the district court erred, and plainly, by not applying the first step in that fashion. Thus, we do not reach the prejudice prong for his alleged plain error. We affirm,” added the Barack Obama appointee.
Despite writing the majority opinion, Phillips penned a second 16-page concurrence providing a more detailed legal history of the Moore decision dating back to passage of the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act.
“I disagree with Moon Seals’ arguments that Moore I improperly interpreted the disputed statutes and sentencing guidelines. Instead, Moore I reached the sensible result that Congress directed by its 1994 statutory amendments,” Phillips concluded.
In his own single-page concurrence, Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Murphy wrote that he actually agreed with Moon Seals in that the lower court failed to properly apply Moore , but the Bill Clinton appointee ultimately signed onto the majority opinion because the defendant “failed to show the error affected his substantial rights.”
Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge Allison Eid rounded out the panel and appeared to find the majority opinion sufficient.
Moon Seals was represented by federal public defender Jacob Rasch-Chabot, who did not respond to an inquiry for comment. Nor did the U.S. Department of Justice.
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