Justices to Revisit Thorny Issue of Sentencing Guidelines in First Cases After Recess

[Doondoo]

The Supreme Court returns on Tuesday from a monthlong recess to face a daunting and urgent task: explaining what it meant two years ago when it ruled that the federal sentencing guidelines were to be treated as “advisory,” no longer binding on federal judges.

The decision that dropped that bombshell on the criminal justice system, United States v. Booker, has not penetrated public consciousness in the way that, say, the Miranda decision on the right against self-incrimination did a generation ago. But in its own way, it has been no less revolutionary, creating turmoil in criminal sentencing.

The justices will hear arguments on Tuesday morning in two cases that will provide the latest chapter, although almost certainly not the final one, in the court’s continuing and, to many, profoundly unsettling reappraisal of the roles of juries and judges in criminal sentencing.

The Booker decision came in two parts, each decided by a different 5-to-4 majority, with only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joining the majority in both halves. The court ruled on the one hand that the sentencing guidelines violated defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury by giving judges, rather than juries, the power to make the factual findings that determined where to set the actual sentence within the range provided by the guidelines.

It then ruled that the guidelines system could nonetheless be saved as long as the guidelines were considered advisory rather than mandatory, to be consulted by judges in the course of imposing sentences that would be upheld on appeal as long as they were not “unreasonable.” A debate over the meaning of “unreasonable” lies at the heart of the two cases the court will hear on Tuesday.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/washington/20scotus.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[salin]

1. k & r

this has been an area of contention, iirc, between conservative justices and the 'conservative movement'. The public cries by the likes of DeLay to rate judges on their 'faithfulness' to the sentencing guidelines threw more fuel on the fire. This should be interesting.