Second Circuit breathes life into the parsimony provision
I am very pleased to report that, only two years after Booker declared § 3553(a) central to federal sentencing, a circuit court has finally paid some attention to the key operative language of that provision. Today, in US v. Ministro-Tapia, No. 05-5101 (2d Cir. Nov. 28, 2006) (available here), the Second Circuit talks through the so-called parsimony provision of § 3553(a), which states that the “district court shall impose a sentence sufficient, but not greater than necessary, to comply with the purposes set forth in paragraph (2) of [§ 3553(a)].” In Ministro-Tapia, the court states that “if a district court were explicitly to conclude that two sentences equally served the statutory purpose of § 3553, it could not, consistent with the parsimony clause, impose the higher.”
Many thanks to Yuanchung Lee for alerting me to this important new decision; Yuanchung gives his take on the ruling here at the Second Circuit Blog. (Notably, though this ruling is important in the broader parsimony battle, the defendant lost his own personal war: the Second Circuit ultimately rejected the defendant’s argument that the district court violated the parsimony command when imposing a within-guideline sentence.) Yuanchung astutely suggests that “[a]ll practitioners should cite this [parsimony] passage in future sentencing memoranda to district courts” and calls Ministro-Tapia “a clarion call to district courts to impose in each case the lowest sentence necessary to achieve the ends of sentencing.”
Some (dated but related) posts on the parsimony provision: