The Supreme Court has handed down Rita v. United States, an important case on how federal courts determine and review criminal sentences imposed under the federal Sentencing Guidlines.
The Court’s conclusion: It is permissible for appellate courts to apply a non-binding presumption of reasonableness to within-guidelines sentences. Both the Sentencing Commisson and district courts are trying to do the same basic thing, the Court reasons, so if they both agreed on a sentence — the Commission on a range, the judge on a sentence within the range — then an appellate court can safely presume that the resulting sentence was reasonable. This doesn’t violate the 6th Amendment, the Court holds, because it should be understood just as a sensible presumption, not a binding conclusion.
Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion, joined in full by Roberts, Stevens, Kennedy, Ginburg and Alito, and joined in part by Scalia and Thomas. Stevens wrote a concurrence mostly joined by Ginsburg, and Scalia wrote a concurrence joined by Thomas. Justice Souter dissented.
My very quick skim of the opinion leaves me with the impression that the Justices felt it was time to stop leaving open the guessing game of Blakely/Booker and to start imposing some clear guidance for courts to follow. (The hand of Chief Justice Roberts, perhaps?) The result ends up not very far from what we had under the Guidelines regime — Justice Breyer wins out in the end, it seems — but it tries to impose some certainty and uniformity on the chaos threatened by the Apprendi/Blakely revolution.
Over at Sentencing Law & Policy, Doug Berman suggests that the majority opinion will only create more confusion in the law. I’m not the sentencing expert that Doug is, but my read on the opinion is different. As I see it, the Court permits a presumption but does not mandate it, and the presumption cannot be absolute. The Court effectively approves one method of reviewing sentences (and shows how it would be done in the Rita case itself) while not foreclosing other approaches. Presumably this gives lower courts the chance to decide if they want to embrace the Rita-endorsed approach or something else; if other courts coalesce around another approach, the Court can grant cert to review that alternative method down the road. That’s my sense, at least; I’ll be interested to hear what others think about this.