204
Opinion of the Court
sentence under the Guidelines, as well as the district court's stated reasons for the imposition of the particular sentence. § 3742(e). A sentence thus can be "reasonable" even if some of the reasons given by the district court to justify the departure from the presumptive guideline range are invalid, provided that the remaining reasons are sufficient to justify the magnitude of the departure.
C
The dissent interprets the "reasonableness" standard of § 3742(f)(2) to be the sole provision governing appellate review of departure decisions. The dissent also posits a two-step test of reasonableness: the appellate court must determine the reasonableness of the district court's decision to depart based on the court's stated reasons for departure, post, at 218, and the appellate court must determine the reasonableness of the amount or extent of departure, post, at 218-220. This is similar to our two-step inquiry, see supra, at 201-202, for determining when a remand is required. The dissent thus agrees that "[w]here all the reasons enunciated by the district court to support departure are found to be invalid," the appellate court "must set aside the sentence and remand the case," post, at 218, although it would find such a remand necessary because "the departure is per se unreasonable," ibid., and not because it was imposed "as a result of" an incorrect application of the Guidelines. When some but not all of the district court's reasons for departure are invalid, however, the dissent's position requires the appellate court to consider whether the district court could have based its departure on the remaining factors, post, at 219, and not whether it would still have chosen so to act, supra, at 203.
In practical effect, therefore, the divergence of the dissent's interpretation of the statute from our own is in the degree of an appellate court's authority to affirm a sentence when the district court, once made aware of the errors in its interpretation of the Guidelines, may have chosen a different
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