Opinion ID: 3021015
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Does the Feeney Amendment Violate the

Text: Separation of Powers? The United States Sentencing Commission is an “independent commission in the judicial branch” composed of seven voting members selected by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. 28 U.S.C. § 991(a). Prior to the Feeney Amendment in 2003, at least three members of the Commission were to be judges selected from a list submitted to the President by the Judicial Conference of the United States. Id. The Feeney Amendment modified this provision to state that “no more than three” members may be judges, thus allowing the President to appoint, if he wishes, only members of the Executive Branch to the Commission. The Commission is charged, inter alia, with drafting and 7 promulgating the Sentencing Guidelines, 28 U.S.C. § 994, and must submit proposed amendments to the Guidelines to Congress, which then has a specified period of time (at least 180 days) to modify or disapprove them before they become effective. Id. § 994(p). Guidelines sentence calculations must fall within the statutory range prescribed by Congress. See id. § 994(a) (stating that the Guidelines must be “consistent with all pertinent provisions of any Federal statute”); U.S.S.G. § 5G1.1 (stating that the Guidelines are inapplicable if the minimum sentence recommended by the Guidelines is higher than the statutory maximum, or if the maximum sentence recommended by the Guidelines is lower than the statutory minimum). In Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361 (1989), the Supreme Court held that the Sentencing Commission, as it was then constituted, did not violate the separation of powers. The Court held that Congress was within constitutional bounds in delegating to the Commission authority to promulgate the Guidelines, id. at 374-79, and that the composition of the Commission (including at least three federal judges) was constitutional. Id. at 397-408. The Court noted that “Congress’ decision to create an independent rulemaking body to promulgate sentencing guidelines and to locate that body within the Judicial Branch is not unconstitutional unless Congress has vested in the Commission powers that are more appropriately performed by the other Branches or that undermine the integrity of the Judiciary.” Id. at 385. It deemed the functions of the Commission, particularly the promulgation of the Guidelines, to 8 be well within the judiciary’s role. The Court noted, for example, that “the sentencing function long has been a peculiarly shared responsibility among the Branches of Government and has never been thought of as the exclusive constitutional province of any one Branch.” Id. at 390. It dismissed as “fanciful” the argument that the President’s power to appoint and remove the Commission’s members gave him unconstitutional authority over the judiciary. Id. at 409; see id. at 410 (“We simply cannot imagine that federal judges will comport their actions to the wishes of the President for the purpose of receiving an appointment to the Sentencing Commission.”). Moreover, the Court concluded that the Commission “is not a court and exercises no judicial power,” and thus there was no concern that membership on the Commission would “vest Article III power in nonjudges or require Article III judges to share their power with nonjudges.” Id. at 408. The Court noted in dicta that “[if] Congress decided to confer responsibility for promulgating sentencing guidelines on the Executive Branch, we might face the constitutional questions whether Congress unconstitutionally had assigned judicial responsibilities to the Executive or unconstitutionally had united the power to prosecute and the power to sentence within one Branch.” Id. at 391 n.17. Coleman seeks to build on this observation to argue that, since the Feeney Amendment effectively removed all mandatory judicial input from the Sentencing Commission (and thus the Guidelines), the result is 9 an unconstitutional consolidation of power in the Executive Branch. See United States v. Pojilenko, 416 F.3d 243, 249 n.6 (3d Cir. 2005) (noting that “the Feeney Amendment’s change in the composition of the Sentencing Commission may provide an arguable basis for distinguishing Mistretta,” but rejecting the argument on plain-error review). He relies heavily on a 2004 District Court decision in the District of Oregon — United States v. Detwiler, 338 F. Supp. 2d 1166 (D. Or. 2004) — that is, to our knowledge, the only federal court decision to accept Coleman’s argument. We need not consider whether Detwiler was correctly decided under the then-mandatory Guidelines regime, because the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), dramatically altered the equation. Indeed, the District Court’s remedy for the perceived separation of powers violation in Detwiler — conversion of the mandatory Guidelines into a non-binding, advisory system, see 338 F. Supp. 2d at 1182 — is essentially the remedy the Supreme Court adopted in Booker, albeit for a different constitutional violation. See Booker, 543 U.S. at 259-61 (excising the requirement in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(b)(1) that the Guidelines be applied mandatorily, and stating that henceforth the Guidelines are advisory and should be considered by sentencing courts as one of several sentencing factors under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)). Thus, while Coleman’s argument that the Feeney Amendment unconstitutionally allows the President to control 10 sentencing might have been persuasive while the Guidelines were still mandatory, it is misplaced under the now-advisory system. Regardless of the composition of the Commission, the Guidelines it promulgates do not control sentencing; the Guidelines’ recommended range may be modified or disregarded by a district court upon consideration of the other sentencing factors Congress has identified in § 3553(a). We also reject Coleman’s argument that the Guidelines, though advisory, are nonetheless presumptively reasonable and thus give rise to the same separation of powers concerns (the argument being, we presume, that the Guidelines are still mandatory in fact). In United States v. Cooper, 437 F.3d 324 (3d Cir. 2006), we observed that “a within-guidelines sentence is not necessarily reasonable per se” because such a system “would come close to restoring the mandatory nature of the guidelines excised in Booker.” Id. at 331 (emphasis added). We also declined to “adopt a rebuttable presumption of reasonableness for within-guidelines sentences.” Id. at 331-32. Although the Guidelines’ recommendation is one of the factors to be considered under § 3553(a) — and thus “a within-guidelines range sentence is more likely to be reasonable than one that lies outside the advisory guidelines range,” id. at 331(emphasis added) — this does not mean a presumption of reasonableness attaches to the Guidelines range. Hence, even assuming for the sake of argument that Coleman’s assertion might have some force in a Circuit where the Guidelines are presumptively reasonable, see, e.g., United States v. Mykytiuk, 11 415 F.3d 606, 608 (7th Cir. 2005), it is not persuasive here.3