Second Circuit reverses below-guideline sentence

The Second Circuit on Wednesday in US v. Rattoballi, No. 05-1562 (2d Cir. June 15, 2006) (available here), thoughtfully and thoroughly discusses reasonableness review at length in the course of reversing a below-guideline sentence.  Here are just a few of the many notable passages in Rattoballi:

[O]n appellate review, we will view as inherently suspect a non-Guidelines sentence that rests primarily upon factors that are not unique or personal to a particular defendant, but instead reflects attributes common to all defendants.  Disparate sentences prompted the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act and remain its principal concern….

A non-Guidelines sentence that a district court imposes in reliance on factors incompatible with the Commission’s policy statements may be deemed substantively unreasonable in the absence of persuasive explanation as to why the sentence actually comports with the § 3553(a) factors….

A sentence must reflect consideration of the balance of the § 3553(a) factors; unjustified reliance upon any one factor is a symptom of an unreasonable sentence.

UPDATE: Yuangchung Lee has a long, critical post of this decision here at the Second Circuit Blog.  Here is how it starts and ends:

Someone please wake us up: We read this opinion and had a nightmarethat we lived either in another Circuit or in an alternate universe inwhich Booker had never happened.  In an extraordinary act of law-making that flouts Booker and contradicts core post-Booker caselaw in the Second Circuit, including Crosby and Fernandez,C.J. Walker, along with former and future C.J.s Winter and Jacobs,writes as if on a clean slate (and as if this were the 7th or 8thCircuits rather than the 2nd) and overturns, for the first time since Bookerwas decided 17 months ago, a sentence as substantively unreasonable(i.e., just too long). Cynics will not be surprised that this occurredon a Government appeal of a below-the-range sentence, rather than adefendant’s appeal of an above-the-range sentence….

As stated at the outset, en banc rehearing of this decision is appropriate in light of its inconsistency with cases such as Crosby and Fernandez.The decision’s seeming resurrection of the mandatory Guidelines regimealso, of course, contradicts Justice Stevens’s merits majority opinionin Booker.