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Appellate Review of Sentencing
Justice Breyer's remedial opinion in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), not only rendered the Federal Sentencing Guidelines advisory but also called on appellate judges to ensure that sentences are not "unreasonable." Eighteen months after Booker, the appellate courts are still grappling with how to determine whether a sentence is reasonable or not. This month, four authors--Judge Nancy Gertner, Professors Doug Berman and Steve Chanenson, and Yale Law Journal Editor Eric Citron--offer their perspectives on the definition and practical meaning of appellate review of sentencing.
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Sentencing Review: Judgment, Justice, and the Judiciary
Since United States v. Booker, the main task of sentencing academics and appellate judges has been to solve the riddles of its mandated “reasonableness” review. This is a crucial task because the answers reached will largely determine whether Booker’s promise of fresh discretion in federal sen…
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Reasoning Through Reasonableness
After United States v. Booker, federal district judges may no longer just find Guideline-specified facts, plug those facts into a Guideline calculation, and then mechanically impose a Guideline sentence. Instead of sentencing-by-the-numbers, Booker requires district courts to exercise independent re…
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What Yogi Berra Teaches About Post-Booker Sentencing
Judicial opinions post-Booker reflect something that the great legal scholar Yogi Berra described. The same decisions that turned the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (“Guidelines”) into mandatory rules are being adopted by courts across the country, with the same results. Booker or no Booker, it i…