Cite as: 518 U. S. 81 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
V
The goal of the Sentencing Guidelines is, of course, to reduce unjustified disparities and so reach toward the evenhandedness and neutrality that are the distinguishing marks of any principled system of justice. In this respect, the Guidelines provide uniformity, predictability, and a degree of detachment lacking in our earlier system. This, too, must be remembered, however. It has been uniform and constant in the federal judicial tradition for the sentencing judge to consider every convicted person as an individual and every case as a unique study in the human failings that sometimes mitigate, sometimes magnify, the crime and the punishment to ensue. We do not understand it to have been the congressional purpose to withdraw all sentencing discretion from the United States district judge. Discretion is reserved within the Sentencing Guidelines, and reflected by the standard of appellate review we adopt.
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The Court of Appeals identified the wrong standard of review. It erred as well in finding that victim misconduct did not justify the five-level departure and that susceptibility to prison abuse and the burdens of successive prosecutions could not be relied upon for the three-level departure. Those sentencing determinations were well within the sound discretion of the District Court. The District Court did abuse its discretion in relying on the other two factors forming the three-level departure: career loss and low recidivism risk. When a reviewing court concludes that a district court based a departure on both valid and invalid factors, a remand is required unless it determines the district court would have imposed the same sentence absent reliance on the invalid factors. Williams, 503 U. S., at 203. As the District Court here stated that none of the four factors standing alone would justify the three-level departure, it is not evident that
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