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Court Restores Sentencing Leeway To Judges

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By LINDA GREENHOUSE, The New York Times

Published: December 11, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday restored federal judges to their traditional central role in criminal sentencing.

In two decisions, the court said federal district judges have broad discretion to impose what they think are reasonable sentences, even if federal guidelines call for different sentences.

One decision was particularly emphatic in saying judges are free to disagree with guidelines that call for much longer sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine than for crimes involving an equivalent amount of cocaine in powdered form.

Both cases, each decided by the same 7-2 alignment, chided federal appeals courts for failing to give district judges sufficient leeway.

The appeals court had in each case overturned a sentence that was lower than that provided by the guidelines.

The two dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

In the crack case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it was reasonable for a federal judge in Virginia to impose a lower sentence than one prescribed by the guidelines because of his disagreement with the rule that imposed the same sentence for a crack dealer as for someone selling 100 times as much powder cocaine.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said the law did not allow the judge to make such a determination.

But Ginsburg wrote that "the cocaine guidelines, like all other guidelines, are advisory only" and that "the court of appeals erred in holding the crack/powder disparity effectively mandatory."

The disparity has been challenged by civil rights groups because crack is most often used by blacks, powder cocaine by whites, thus subjecting blacks to the tougher penalties. The court's decision did not touch on that argument.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission this year adopted guidelines, which went into effect last month, that substantially lessen the disparity, and it is scheduled to vote today on whether nearly 20,000 prisoners sentenced under the old guidelines should be eligible to ask courts to cut their sentences.

The court also agreed that a judge was within his rights to impose a light sentence for a man convicted of conspiracy to sell 10,000 pills of the drug ecstasy.

The guidelines said that Brian Gall should be sentenced to at least 30 months in jail. But a federal judge in Iowa said Gall had quit the drug business years before authorities had found evidence of his involvement and had turned his life around. The judge sentenced him to probation.

The government appealed the sentence, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit agreed that the sentence was out of line.

The Supreme Court reversed the decision, saying the judge had not abused his discretion to decide the proper sentence in an individual case.

"Courts of appeals must review all sentences - whether inside, just outside, or significantly outside the guidelines range - under a deferential abuse-of-discretion standard," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

He added that the "sentence imposed by the experienced district judge in this case was reasonable."

The court ruled in 2005 that the sentencing guidelines should be treated as advisory, so long as a judge's decision was reasonable. But a definition of "reasonable" has been elusive in the lower courts.

Douglas Berman, a sentencing expert at The Ohio State University law school, said the rulings "are a major victory for criminal defendants and for district court judges who can use discretion in sentencing now that the guidelines are advisory only."

He added that the decisions prove "once again that the Supreme Court might be the most liberal appellate court in the country when it comes to sentencing issues."

Taken together, the decisions reflected the remarkable trajectory the court has traveled in the seven years since it overturned a New Jersey hate-crime statute on the ground that the law gave judges an unconstitutional degree of authority to make the crucial factual determinations that added a hate-crime "enhancement" to an ordinary criminal sentence.

Along with their diminished function under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which set up the federal sentencing guidelines system, federal judges appeared to have been all but ejected from their role at the heart of criminal sentencing.

Judges still may not impose sentences above the range written into law by Congress or state legislatures.

The decision on Monday, though, gives judges broad discretion to impose sentences higher or lower than the guidelines, which are not statutes and are issued by the sentencing commission.

It is clear that although judges should consult the guidelines, they are just one factor and do not carry special weight. It is also clear that an appeals court must have a good reason to displace the trial judge's judgment.

Information from The Washington Post was used in this report.

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