Sentencing; Reasonableness

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Sentencing; Reasonableness

A congressionally mandated guideline is entitled to a presumption of reasonableness.

“We follow the course laid out by our sister circuits.

Smith does not explain why this court should accord less deference to a guideline based on Congress’s judgment concerning the statutory maximums and the definition of violent felonies—to which the career-offender guidelines and their definition of crimes of violence are tied—rather than the Commission’s own studies. Absent a strong reason to reject congressional judgments
about sentencing, courts traditionally respect them as valid. See Schuster, 706 F.3d at 808 (noting when rejecting a reasonableness challenge to a child-pornography-guideline sentence that ‘Congress itself may have studied the problem of child pornography’); Kiderlen, 569 F.3d at 369 (‘in the real-world circumstance where a sentencing judge agrees with Congress, then the resulting sentence is also probably within the range of reasonableness’); Kirchhof, 505 F.3d at 414 (reasoning that, though a guideline may not ‘reflect the expertise of the Sentencing Commission,’ an argument challenging the presumption on that basis ‘fails to recognize that it is the prerogative of Congress to fix the sentence for a federal crime’ and ‘it is not the court’s role to second-guess the legislative determination of appropriate sentences’).”

Affirmed.

13-1401 U.S. v. Smith

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, Herndon, J., Per Curiam.

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