312
O'Connor, J., dissenting
enough to make clear an otherwise ambiguous penal statute. Cf. Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837, 843, n. 9 (1984) ("clear congressional intent" may be discerned by application of "traditional tools of statutory construction"). Like Congress' statutes, the decisions of this Court are law, the knowledge of which we have always imputed to the citizenry. At issue here, though, is a rule that would also require knowledge of committee reports and floor statements, which are not law. I agree with Justice Scalia that there appears scant justification for extending the "necessary fiction" that citizens know the law, see ante, at 309, to such extralegal materials.
Justice O'Connor, with whom Justice Blackmun joins, dissenting.
By failing to interpret 18 U. S. C. § 5037(c)(1)(B) in light of the statutory scheme of which it is a part, the Court interprets a "technical amendment" to make sweeping changes to the process and focus of juvenile sentencing. Instead, the Court should honor Congress' clear intention to leave settled practice in juvenile sentencing undisturbed.
When Congress enacted the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, it authorized the United States Sentencing Commission (Sentencing Commission or Commission) to overhaul the discretionary system of adult sentencing. As an important aspect of this overhaul, Guidelines sentencing formalizes sentencing procedures. The Commission explains:
"In pre-guidelines practice, factors relevant to sentencing were often determined in an informal fashion. The informality was to some extent explained by the fact that particular offense and offender characteristics rarely had a highly specific or required sentencing consequence. This situation will no longer exist under sentencing guidelines. The court's resolution of disputed sentencing factors will usually have a measurable effect on the applicable punishment. More formal-
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