En banc Ninth Circuit concludes application of guidelines should generally be reviewed for abuse of discretion

The Ninth Circuit today issues a relatively short en banc ruling that should be of particular interest to hard-core appellate review sentencing aficionados. The start of the opinion in US v. Gasca-Ruiz, No. 14-50342 (9th Cir. April 5, 2017) (available here), covers the basics:

We took this case en banc to resolve an intra-circuit conflict over the standard of review that applies when we review a district court’s application of the United States Sentencing Guidelines to the facts of a given case. We conclude that as a general rule such decisions should be reviewed for abuse of discretion.

If you still hanker for more, here is a paragraph from the heart of the court's analysis:

District courts make far more guideline-application decisions of all sorts, see Koon v. United States, 518 U.S. 81, 98 (1996), and thus are likely to be more familiar with the nuances that go into applying Guidelines provisions across the board. Guideline-application decisions, as we have defined them, almost always “depen[d] heavily upon an understanding of the significance of case-specific details,” Buford, 532 U.S. at 65, because once the district court has identified the correct legal standard and properly found the relevant historical facts, all that remains is the fact-bound judgment as to whether a specific set of facts satisfies the governing legal standard.  In the Sentencing Guidelines context in particular, that is a judgment district courts are uniquely qualified to make.  Each guideline-application decision is ultimately geared toward assessing whether the defendant before the court should be viewed as more or less culpable than other offenders in a given class.  In light of their experience sentencing defendants on a day-in-and-day-out basis, district courts possess an institutional advantage over appellate courts in making such culpability assessments. See Koon, 518 U.S. at 98.