The joys of post-Booker review in the 8th Circuit

Along with the Seventh Circuit, the Eighth Circuit has been among the most active in exploring the dynamics of post-Booker appellate review.  And today the Eighth Circuit has a bunch of sentencing rulings on this official opinion page that further fill out the review story.  Two published dispositions of note are US v. Sanchez, No. 05-1345 (8th Cir. Nov. 16, 2005) (available here), which gives short shrift to a claim about the unreasonableness of a long (but below guideline) sentence, and US v. Tobacco, No. 05-2524 (8th Cir. Nov. 16, 2005) (available here), which has an interesting discussion of reasonableness and the consideration of family circumstances.

Tobacco has me fired up a bit because, to justify its decision to affirm, the Eighth Circuit highlights that the defendant “cites no case in which we have remanded for failure to adequately consider family responsibilities.”  But here the Tobocco court is blowing smoke: before Booker, a district court’s failure to depart on the basis of family responsibilities was unreviewable and thus it would have been essentially impossible for such a case to exist.  And once we weed out this argument, the Tobocco ruling has little else to chew on and really does not seem up to snuff.