766
Breyer, J., dissenting
outside the "heartland" of cases embodying the conduct that individual Guidelines describe. 18 U. S. C. § 3553(b); USSG ch. 1, pt. A4(b); Koon v. United States, 518 U. S. 81, 92-96 (1996). This "departure authority" is important because no set of Guidelines can anticipate every situation. Where "there exists an aggravating or mitigating circumstance of a kind, or to a degree, not adequately taken into consideration by the Sentencing Commission in formulating the guidelines," a judge has the authority to impose an appropriate sentence, so long as that sentence is within the range authorized by the statute under which the defendant was convicted. See 18 U. S. C. § 3553(b); see also 28 U. S. C. § 991(b)(1)(B).
As the Commission has pointed out, this system reflects the Sentencing Act's "detailed instructions . . . the most important of which directs the Commission to create categories of offense behavior and offender characteristics." USSG ch. 1, pt. A2 (emphasis added). See also 28 U. S. C. §§ 994(c) and (d). Twenty-five statutory subsections, §§ 994(a)-(y), contain these and other "detailed instructions"—instructions that both "delegat[e] broad authority to the Commission to . . . rationalize the federal sentencing process," USSG ch. 1, pt. A2, and also describe, at least in rough outline, how the Commission should go about exercising that authority. The case before us concerns 1 of those 25 subsections, 28 U. S. C. § 994(h), which I shall call the "career offender" subsection.
B
The "career offender" subsection provides more specific directions than most other subsections. It says that the Commission
"shall assure that the guidelines specify a sentence to a term of imprisonment at or near the maximum term authorized for categories of defendants in which the defendant is eighteen years old or older and—
"(1) has been convicted of a felony that is— "(A) a crime of violence; or
Page: Index Previous 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007