Now a full decade after Rita, Gall and Kimbrough, do any Justices still care about reasonableness review?

The question in the title of this post is prompted in part by my work, recently and in prior years, on amicus briefs in which I have noted to the US Supreme Court that many judges and many commentators have suggested that the appellate review of sentences — and all of federal sentencing under advisory Guidelines — would benefit significantly from the Court's further guidance on the contours of reasonableness review.   

A little more that a decade ago, the jurisprudential troika of Rita, Gall and Kimbrough provided an initial SCOTUS accounting of reasonableness review.  But it is now pretty easy to provide a string cite of commentary noting the mess that reasonableness review has become in the circuits.  See, e.g.,  Carrie Leonetti, De Facto Mandatory: A Quantitative Assessment Of Reasonableness Review After Booker, 66 DePaul L. Rev. 51 (2016) (lamenting disparate circuit approaches to reasonableness review creating a “patchwork of guideline sentencing in which defendants’ sentences are dictated more by the happenstance of geography than by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence”); Note, More Than a Formality: The Case for Meaningful Substantive Reasonableness Review, 127 Harv. L. Rev. 951 (2014) (discussing a “number of notable circuit splits” concerning reasonableness review); D. Michael Fisher, Still in Balance? Federal District Court Discretion and Appellate Review Six Years After Booker, 49 Duq. L. Rev. 641, 649-61 (2011) (noting that “the courts of appeals have differed over how to apply the [reasonableness] standard” and “have split on several important legal questions”).

My decision to gripe on this front today is also prompted by this pending cert petition in Ford-Bey v. US recently brought to my attention.  Here is the question presented to the Supreme Court in this petition:

In Rita v. United States, 551 U.S. 338 (2007), the Court held that an appellate court could presume that a procedurally reasonable within-Guidelines sentence is also substantively reasonable. But the Court stressed that the presumption was rebuttable, reflecting only that a sentence is more likely to be substantively reasonable where the district judge and the Sentencing Commission agree.

A decade later, the majority of Circuits have never found Rita’s presumption rebutted. In that time, fewer than ten defendants nationwide have succeeded in rebutting Rita’s presumption.  Here, the Fourth Circuit issued a routine per curiam affirmance, despite petitioner’s extraordinary post-sentencing rehabilitation — and despite the Commission’s 2012 decision to withdraw all guidance on post-sentencing rehabilitation.

Has Rita’s non-binding presumption of reasonableness become effectively binding?