Court Opinion

ID: 9499251
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:42:35.845822+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:22.869303
License: Public Domain

BRIGHT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The majority’s determination that the district judge erred when sentencing Mr. Likens to probation serves as yet another example of the upside down world of sentencing in the federal courts.
*827In this present case, the district judge determined that probation is right and just given all the circumstances. That was his reasoned judgment based on his significant experience and consideration.1 To reverse this exercise of discretion in such a close case seems wrong.
There is nothing abusive about the exercise of reason simply because it is also an exercise of compassion. The majority’s opinion reads as if sentencing Mr. Likens to probation essentially would leave him unpunished. This is hardly the case; three years’ probation would still serve to significantly curtail Mr. Likens’s mobility, activities, drug-use, and personal freedom while sparing the citizens of this country the expense of incarcerating a person in poor health who is no danger to society. Incarceration is not the only, and indeed not even always the best, means of punishing or deterring crime.
From the cold record before me, I can’t say whether Mr. Likens deserves incarceration or not. Again, it is a close call — but not ours to make. The sentencing judge exercised his reasoned discretion and, without more, this court should not disturb it. Discretion in sentencing belongs to the district court. Unfortunately, it is a prerogative that this court will not recognize in many, perhaps too many, eases. See United States v. McDonald, 461 F.3d 948, 959-60, 2006 WL 2528580, *9-10 (8th Cir.2006) (Bye, J., dissenting). Thus, I dissent.

. In his tenure as a federal district judge, Judge Pratt has sentenced approximately nine hundred ninety offenders. We have reviewed only a minuscule number of those cases. Judge Pratt has had the experience, to decide the fate of more than nine hundred real peo-pie, all of whom he has looked in the eye when imposing a sentence. (Information regarding the number of sentences Judge Pratt has imposed was obtained from his chambers.)