Justices Reinforce Leeway on Sentences

Although Ginsburg pointed out in the opinion that 85 percent of those convicted of crack offenses are black, the decision hinged on the question of judicial discretion, not whether the disparity was unwarranted or discriminatory.

The court was not in a position to strike down a federal law that also incorporates the disparity in calculating minimum mandatory sentences for cocaine trafficking: five years for a person with five grams of crack, and the same for a person selling 500 grams of powder cocaine. Congress has scheduled hearings for next year on legislation that would change those minimum-mandatory laws.

They were enacted in the 1980s, in a reaction to the death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias by a cocaine overdose and to an epidemic of crack use that threatened to overwhelm urban areas where its use was most prevalent.

In the other case, the court agreed that a judge was within his rights to impose a light sentence for a man convicted of conspiracy to sell 10,000 pills of the drug ecstasy.

The guidelines said that the man, Brian Gall, should be sentenced to at least 30 months in jail. But a federal judge in Iowa decided on 36 months of probation, saying Gall had quit the drug business years before authorities had found evidence of his involvement and had turned his life around.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit said such an "extraordinary" deviation required justification that the judge did not meet.

The Supreme Court yesterday reversed that ruling. "Courts of appeals must review all sentences -- whether inside, just outside, or significantly outside the guidelines range -- under a deferential abuse-of-discretion standard," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court.

The court's struggle over sentencing has split it in ways different from the liberal-conservative divide. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Ginsburg and Stevens opinions, part of a majority also including Justices Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter, Anthony Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented in both cases.

"It is possible to read the opinion to mean that district judges, after giving the guidelines a polite nod, may then proceed essentially as if the Sentencing Reform Act had never been enacted," Alito wrote in his dissent in Gall v. U.S. As a result, he said, "sentencing disparities will gradually increase."

Even though Souter was in the majority, he wrote in a concurring opinion that the best way to deal with inconclusive standards resulting from the court's evolving decisions would be for Congress to reestablish mandatory sentencing guidelines, provided that juries find all facts necessary to impose the toughest sentences.

Douglas A. Berman, a sentencing expert at Ohio State University's law school, said in a statement that the rulings "are a major victory for criminal defendants and for district court judges who can use discretion in sentencing now that the guidelines are advisory only."