United States v. Nurse, Docket No. 05-4976-cr (Aug. 17, 2006) (found here)
Nurse violated the terms of her supervised release. (I am resisting the "Naughty Nurse" reference temptation.) Section 7B1.4 of the Guidelines recommended a 7 to 13 month term of imprisonment for that violation. The district court, however, imposed a 24 month term of imprisonment -- over double the top-end recommended by the Guidelines. In doing so, the district court "noted" that "'it ha[d] a history with Ms. Nurse, having presided over her trial and knowing the nature of the offenses that were involved in that'" and, according to the Second Circuit, "this 'history' and 'knowledge' of Nurse allowed [the district court] to determine that she 'will say whatever she has to say in order to get the results she seeks' and that the Court had 'never had another defendant quite like Ms. Nurse.'"
So far as the Second Circuit was concerned, that was good enough to support a finding that the district court had satisfied the requirements of 18 U.S.C. ยง 3553(c)(2) (which requires district courts to state the specific reasons for the imposition of a sentence different than that proscribed by the Guidelines). More specifically, the Second Circuit found that "the Court's reference to the substance of a section 3553(a) factor is sufficient to satisfy section 3553(c)(2)," although the Second Circuit noted that "a more detailed statement of reasons would have been more helpful to the reviewing court."
This watering down of the Section 3553(c)(2) requirement seems consistent with (albeit an extreme interpretation of) Crosby, which held that "we will not prescribe any formulation a sentencing judge will be obliged to follow in order to demonstrate discharge of the duty to 'consider' the Guidelines. In other words, we will no more require 'robotic incantations' by district judges than we did when the Guidelines were mandatory." It is also, however, highly inconsistent with Rattoballi (discussed here), which noted "that several other circuits have endorsed a rule that requires district courts to offer a more compelling accounting the farther a sentence deviates from the advisory Guidelines range. While we have yet to adopt this standard as a rule in this circuit, and do not do so here, we emphasize that our own ability to uphold a sentence as reasonable will be informed by the district court's statement of reasons (or lack thereof) for the sentence that it elects to impose." And, it is further fuel to the fire of the dissent in Jones (discussed here), which took strong issue with the Jones majority's findings concerning the sufficiency of the reasons relied upon by the district court for imposition of a non-Guidelines sentence. In this regard, Nurse is just additional evidence of the internal split within the Second Circuit as to the appropriate procedures and standards for imposing and reviewing post-Booker sentences.
In practice, Nurse cuts both ways. By having the ability to be "looser" in articulating the reasons for imposition of a non-Guidelines sentence, district courts will seemingly have a greater ability to impose non-Guidelines sentences. But those non-Guidelines sentences could either be above or below the Guidelines.
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