Federal Judiciary

United States v. Lambert, No. 07-4846-cr (2d Cir. Feb. 20, 2009) (found here)

In preparing sentencing memoranda, I often cite to United States v. Ministro-Tapia, 470 F.3d 137 (2d Cir. 2006), which dealt with the parsimony clause of 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) and held that "if a district court were explicitly to conclude that two sentences equally served the statutory purpose of 3553(a), it could not, consistent with the parsimony clause, impose the higher."  I've not seen much citation to Ministro-Tapia, which I always thought to be a powerful argument in support of application of the parsimony clause. 

Lambert made the argument.  He contended that the district court committed procedural error in sentencing him "by failing to consider whether a non-Guidelines sentence would have been sufficient to do justice consistent with the parsimony clause of 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)."  The Second Circuit rejected Lambert's appeal, finding that he hadn't "pointed us to [any] evidence that the district court had reached such a conclusion, either explicity or implicitly, and because the record is, in fact, to the contrary, we identify no merit in this procedural challenge."

This does not undermine the importance of Ministro-Tapia.  Rather, it highlights that defense counsel should argue that a non-Guidelines sentence is good enough to satisfy the purposes of punishment, and that courts should impose such sentences consistent with Ministro-Tapia's message.