Court Opinion

ID: 9632592
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 11:20:07.148961+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:08:19.481637
License: Public Domain

COLLOTON, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Our decision portends what Congress once considered unwarranted disparity in the sentencing of federal criminal defendants, but I agree that the result follows from the Supreme Court’s decisions in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 125 S.Ct. 738, 160 L.Ed.2d 621 (2005), and Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38, 128 S.Ct. 586, 169 L.Ed.2d 445 (2007). Therefore, with these additional observations, I concur in the opinion of the court.11
In Booker, the Supreme Court held that certain applications of the mandatory federal sentencing guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment, and adopted a remedy that rendered the guidelines essentially advisory in all cases. The courts of appeals were charged with conducting appellate review to determine whether a sentence was substantively “unreasonable.” Responding to statements in Booker that reasonableness review was designed “to move sentencing in Congress’ preferred direction, helping to avoid excessive sentencing disparities,” 543 U.S. at 264, 125 S.Ct. 738, this court applied a version of proportionality review, in which we required that the district judge’s justifications for a sentence outside the guideline range be “proportional to the extent of the difference between the advisory range and the sentence imposed.” United States v. Gall, 446 F.3d 884, 889 (8th Cir.2006) (internal quotations omitted), rev’d, 552 U.S. 38, 128 S.Ct. 586, 169 L.Ed.2d 445 (2007).
In Gall, however, the Supreme Court held that proportionality review of sentences imposed under § 3553(a) was contrary to Booker and its interpretation of the Sixth Amendment. Gall, 128 S.Ct. at 594. Presumably to avoid Sixth Amendment violations that would result from more rigorous appellate review, see id. at 602 (Scalia, J., concurring), the Court emphasized that a court of appeals reviewing a district court’s application of the § 3553(a) factors must refrain from proportionality review and proceed under a deferential abuse of discretion standard. The Court did say that a court of appeals may still consider “the extent of any variance from the Guidelines range,” Gall, 128 S.Ct. at 597, but without authority to consider whether the extent of the disputed variance is disproportional to the reasons given to justify it, one searches in vain for a principled basis on which to conduct a consistent and coherent appellate review for reasonableness. At least when it comes to variances based on circumstances that are specific to an individual defendant, *468I agree with the court that it will be the unusual case in which we reverse a district court’s sentence as substantively unreasonable.12
Substantive reasonableness review endures, so there must be at least a “shocks the conscience” sort of constraint on district judges, but this case is not in that category. Cf. Rita v. United States, 551 U.S. 338, 365, 127 S.Ct. 2456, 168 L.Ed.2d 203 (2007) (Stevens, J., concurring) (rejecting “purely procedural review” as contrary to Booker, because “[ajfter all, a district judge who gives harsh sentences to Yankees fans and lenient sentences to Red Sox fans would not be acting reasonably even if her procedural rulings were impeccable”). We now must defer to the wide range of personal sentencing philosophies that are reflected in the ranks of district judges, and even with Feemster’s checkered past, a term of ten years’ imprisonment for his most recent drug trafficking is not so lenient that it must be declared beyond the realm of what a reasonable federal judge might select under § 3553(a). I therefore agree that the district court’s judgment must be affirmed.
One consequence of these recent developments is likely to be substantial sentencing disparity in federal criminal cases. District judges are supposed to “take account of sentencing practices in other courts,” Kimbrough, 128 S.Ct. at 574, but there is now no basis in law to declare that one sentencing practice is preferred over another, and no authority for a court of appeals to enforce such a preference. The judge in this case thought Feemster’s “troubled youth” was largely mitigating, and elected to impose the statutory minimum sentence. Other reasonable federal judges will believe that the Sentencing Commission was correct to declare a policy that age, including youth, is ordinarily not relevant to sentencing, USSG § 5H1.1, and that a relatively youthful drug trafficking offender with a serious criminal history should be sentenced at or near the statutory maximum in accordance with the career offender guideline. See United States v. Jackson, 300 Fed.Appx. 428, 429-31 (7th Cir.2008) (affirming sentence within advisory range for career offender who committed offense of conviction at age twenty-two); Marion v. United States, No. 04-94-P-H, 2008 WL 4602304, at *5-8 (D.Me. Oct.15, 2008) (recounting district court’s refusal to vary downward in career offender case based on counsel’s argument that “this is a young man that has worth, he has potential for rehabilitation; he is extremely young” and “[h]e is a product to a large degree of troubled adolescence”); see also 28 U.S.C. § 994(h). Reasonable minds can differ. The offender’s punishment in these career offender cases — ranging from the statutory minimum term to a sentence at or near the statutory maximum — will depend substantially on the luck of the judicial draw. See United *469States v. Maloney, 466 F.3d 663, 669-70 (8th Cir.2006).13
In the 1980s, a bipartisan majority in Congress viewed a similar state of affairs as unacceptable, and opted to remove a substantial degree of discretion from sentencing judges in the interest of uniformity. The Senate Judiciary Committee explained the problem this way:
The absence of a comprehensive Federal sentencing law and of statutory guidance on how to select the appropriate sentencing option creates inevitable disparity in the sentences which courts impose on similarly situated defendants. This occurs in sentences handed down by judges in the same district and by judges from different districts and circuits in the Federal system. One judge may impose a relatively long prison term to rehabilitate or incapacitate the offender. Another judge, under similar circumstances, may sentence the defendant to a shorter prison term simply to punish him, or the judge may opt for the imposition of a term of probation in order to rehabilitate him.
S.Rep. No. 98-225, at 41 (1983) (internal footnotes omitted), reprinted in 1984 U.S.C.C.A.N. 3182, 3224.
The Committee found that much of the variation in sentencing was “directly attributable to the fact that some judges tend to give generally tough or generally lenient sentences,” id. at 44, and that “variation in offense and offender characteristics does not account for most of the disparity.” Id. at 45; Because the Committee believed that “[sjentencing disparities that are not justified by differences among offenses or offenders are unfair both to offenders and to the public,” id., it recommended that “[fjederal statutes should provide clear guidance to Federal judges on how to select from among the available alternatives an appropriate sentence to impose upon the particular defendants before them.” Id. at 49. These observations led to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the mandatory guidelines.
Thoughtful critics of the Sentencing Reform Act have referred to the mandatory guidelines as a “failed experiment,” e.cj., United States v. Canania, 532 F.3d 764, 778 (8th Cir.2008) (Bright, J., concurring), but the fact remains that the elected *470branches have never renounced determinate sentencing or restrictions on the discretion of federal sentencing judges. The most recent action of Congress in this area, albeit controversial, was designed to cabin discretion further by limiting the available grounds for departure and strengthening appellate review. See PROTECT Act, Pub.L. No. 108-21, § 401, 117 Stat. 650, 667-76 (2003). Mandatory minimum sentences remain in full effect with respect to numerous offenses, and they are constitutional. Harris v. United States, 536 U.S. 545, 568-69, 122 S.Ct. 2406, 153 L.Ed.2d 524 (2002). The Supreme Court, recognizing the policy goals of legislatures to make sentences proportional to the gravity of offenses and to achieve parity among defendants, specified that nothing in its Sixth Amendment decisions “impugns those salutary objectives.” Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296, 308, 124 S.Ct. 2531, 159 L.Ed.2d 403 (2004). We have returned to a system of wide discretion for sentencing judges, therefore, not because the people demanded it through the political process, or because it is constitutionally required, but because the Supreme Court decreed the advisory system as a remedy for constitutional flaws in the particular manner in which Congress established determinate sentencing under the Sentencing Reform Act.
The irony is that the Court chose its remedy in Booker on the view that the advisory guidelines would “deviate less radically from Congress’ intended system” than would retention of the mandatory guidelines without judicial factfinding. Booker, 543 U.S. at 247, 125 S.Ct. 738. The Court also acknowledged, however, that appellate review “will not provide the uniformity that Congress originally sought to secure,” id. at 766-67, and in light of Gall and Kimbrough, it appears that with respect to sentences above the statutory minimum, district judges have regained most of the unconstrained discretion that Congress eliminated in 1984. Cf. Booker, 543 U.S. at 297, 125 S.Ct. 738 (Stevens, J., dissenting); id. at 305 (Scalia, J., dissenting). The United States Attorney is understandably frustrated that sentences like the one imposed in this case undermine uniformity, but “it is not our role to fight a rear-guard action to preserve quasi-mandatory Guidelines.” United States v. Gardellini, 545 F.3d 1089, 1096 (D.C.Cir.2008). At this point, any such action must be taken by Congress. See, e.g., Gall, 128 S.Ct. at 603 (Souter, J., concurring) (“After Bookers, remedial holding, I continue to think that the best resolution of the tension between substantial consistency throughout the system and the right of jury trial would be a new Act of Congress: reestablishing a statutory system of mandatory sentencing guidelines (though not identical to the original in all points of detail), but providing for jury findings of all facts necessary to set the upper range of sentencing discretion.”).

. The government correctly acknowledges that Feemster's relative youth, nonuse of a weapon, and performance during prior terms of probation are within the wide range of matters that may be considered by a sentencing court under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), and that facts taken into account when computing an advisory guideline range also may be relevant to other subsections of § 3553(a). As the government also notes, however, the district court made a dubious finding that Feemster successfully completed a one-year term of probation imposed in February 2004, given that Feemster was convicted in this federal case for distributing crack cocaine in March 2004. Cf. ante, at 463 n. 5. Nonetheless, the government did not object to the court's reliance on this finding, and under a plain error standard of review, I see no reasonable probability on the record as a whole that the district court would have selected a longer term of imprisonment without its observation about this term of probation.

. Kimbrough v. United States, 552 U.S. 85, 128 S.Ct 558, 169 L.Ed.2d 481 (2007), and Spears v. United States, - U.S. -, 129 S.Ct. 840, 172 L.Ed.2d 596 (2009) (per curiam), also settled that district judges need give no weight to the crack cocaine guidelines, because they neither embody a policy decision directed by Congress, Kimbrough, 128 S.Ct. at 570-73, nor exemplify the Sentencing Commission's "exercise of its characteristic institutional role” to formulate guidelines in light of "empirical data and national experience.” Id. at 575 (internal quotation omitted). The Supreme Court has reserved decision on whether "closer review” is warranted when a sentencing judge varies from guidelines other than the crack cocaine guidelines "based solely on the judge’s view that the Guidelines range fails properly to reflect § 3553(a) considerations even in a mine-run case,” id. (internal quotation omitted), and that question is not directly presented in this case.

. Early results after Gall and Kimbrough show that sentence disparities are aggravated further by policy disagreements among sentencing judges about what sentence best reflects the § 3553(a) factors in mine-run cases. For example, some district judges now agree with the advisory crack cocaine guidelines (which apply a crack-powder ratio ranging between 25-to-l and 80-to-l), and apply them under § 3553(a). See United States v. Haigler, No. 08-3165, 2009 WL 1228264, at *2 (10th Cir. May 6, 2009); United States v. Gibbons, 553 F.3d 40, 44 (1st Cir.2009). Other judges vary from the advisory guidelines based on a policy disagreement, and apply a crack-powder ratio of 20-to-l, see United States v. Dozier, No. S 108CR08-02, 2009 WL 1286486, at *6 (S.D.N.Y. May 8, 2009), or 10-to — 1, see United States v. Edwards, No. 04-CR-1090-5, 2009 WL 424464, at *3 (N.D.Ill. Feb. 17, 2009), or 1-to-1, see United States v. Gully, 619 F.Supp.2d 633 (N.D.Iowa 2009). Some district judges decline to apply the full measure of penalties recommended by the congressionally directed advisory guideline for possession of child pornography, see United States v. Stern, 590 F.Supp.2d 945, 960-61 (N.D.Ohio 2008); United States v. Baird, 580 F.Supp.2d 889, 894-95 (D.Neb.2008); United States v. Shipley, 560 F.Supp.2d 739, 744 (S.D.Iowa 2008), while other judges believe that rejection of the guideline’s policy understates the seriousness of child pornography offenses and fails to promote respect for law and to provide just punishment. See United States v. Fiorella, 602 F.Supp.2d 1057, 1074-75 (N.D.Iowa 2009). The Sentencing Commission presumably will catalog these and other variations for consideration by the courts and Congress. See Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 125 S.Ct. 738.