United States v. Kizeart’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

14 federal appellate ·

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 77 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Nothing in either of the Court’s majority opinions in Booker suggests that limiting appellate review of sentences not based on the guidelines is needed to avoid the constitutional problem that required the invalidation of parts of the Sentencing Reform Act in order to save the rest of it. The constitutional problem was that judges were basing sentences on facts that they found — not a jury — and by a preponderance of the evidence rather than by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The Court held that for sentencing grounded in such a factfinding process to be mandatory violated the Sixth Amendment. Changing the standard of appellate review of guidelines sentences was necessary because the standard made the guidelines mandatory in appellate proceedings, complementing 18 U.S.C. § 3553 (b), which made them mandatory at the sentencing stage. Since there are no guidelines sentences for violating a condition of supervised release, there was no occasion for the Court in Booker to change the standard of appellate review of such sentences. The Court did not mention subsection [3742](e)(4), which governs the appellate review of nonguidelines sentences, because its decision was concerned only with guidelines sentences.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Bolds