People v. Steanhouse
People v. Masroor
Docket Nos. 152671, 152849, 152871, 152872, 152873, 15946, 152947, and 152948
Trial Lawyer’s Takeaway: all sentencing guidelines are advisory; a sentence’s reasonableness is based on Milbourn proportionality.
Both cases involved sentencing in the aftermath of the Court’s decision in Lockridge, which made Michigan’s sentencing guidelines advisory. Justice McCormack wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Viviano, Bernstein, and Larsen.
First, the Court said Lockridge applied to all guidelines calculations, not just those that required judicial fact-finding. The Court stated that Lockridge ruled that the sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional for two reasons: the judicial fact-finding and the mandatory application. Therefore, all mandatory guidelines were unconstitutional, not just those that required judicial fact-finding.
Second, the Court affirmed Court of Appeals’ holding in Steanhouse that proper appellate review of a sentence for reasonableness is whether trial court abused its discretion by violating the principle of proportionality, from People v. Milbourn, 435 Mich. 630, which requires sentences be proportionate to the seriousness of the circumstances surrounding the crime and the defendant. In doing so, the Court rejected the Court of Appeals decision to also analyze the “reasonability” of a sentence under the federal test articulated in 18 U.S.C. 3553(a). The Court stressed that the proportionality principle did not create a presumption that the guidelines control (which would have been unconstitutional under the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38 (2007)).
Third, the Court clarified that so-called Crosby remands—named for the process described by the Second Circuit in Crosby v. United States, 397 F.3d 103 (2d Cir. 2005)—did not apply to defendants who had received departure sentences (those sentences that departed from the mandatory guidelines) when the guidelines were still deemed mandatory. The reasoning behind this conclusion was that these defendants could not show prejudice, because a trial court that imposed an upward departure would never have imposed a lower sentence had it known that the guidelines were not mandatory. The end result is that only defendants who were sentenced within the guideline range were entitled to Crosby remands. The Court said issue preservation was not relevant to this analysis.
Chief Justice Markman concurred in part and dissented in part, joined by Justice Zahra. Markman’s main gripe was with the Court’s ruling on the first issue—that the guidelines could never be mandatory, even if it did not require judicial fact-finding. Justice Larsen, who joined the majority opinion in full, also issued a concurring opinion, which Justice Viviano joined. She wrote specifically to say that the dissent, in her characterization, seemed to ignore that Lockridge itself said the guidelines, in every application, were unconstitutional. Justice Wilder took no part in the decision.
Full opinion here.