Opinion ID: 151874
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Sentencing Commission's Role

Text: The SRA charged the Commission with designing guidelines that would direct the district courts how to fashion sentences to fulfill § 3553(a)(2)'s sentencing purposes in a way that ensured honesty, proportionality, and fairness. See 28 U.S.C. § 991(b)(1); id. § 994(f). Assembled in a Guidelines manual, the Guidelines resembled a computer program. To impose a sentence, all a district judge had to do was to input information requested by the manual and the manual would generate a sentencing range. Every sentence had an offense- and an offender-based component. United States v. Mogel, 956 F.2d 1555, 1558 (11th Cir. 1992); see 28 U.S.C. § 994(b) (instructing that the Commission establish a sentencing range for each category of offense involving each category of defendant). The offense-based component correlated mostly to the sentencing purposes of punishment and general deterrence; the offender-based component correlated mostly to the purposes of specific deterrence and rehabilitation. See Mogel, 956 F.2d at 1559. The district court found the sentence it was to impose by consulting a table in the Guidelines manual: the table's Y axis specified offense levels; its X axis specified categories of offenders. See U.S.S.G. § 1B1.1; id. Ch.5, Pt.A (Sentencing Table) The table listed an appropriate sentencing range for each combination of offense level and category of offender.