Federal Judiciary

United States v. Melvin, No. 09-2839-cr (2d Cir. May 27, 2010) (found here)

If you really want to know what the Second Circuit thinks of reasonableness review, please consider the following two quotations.  I'm not saying that the Second Circuit would never find a sentence to be substantively unreasonable.  Indeed, it recently did so in United States v. Dorvee (discussed here).  Still, the following two quotations are an indication of how difficult the substantive unreasonableness battle is, particularly when challenging a Guidelines sentence:

"We will rarely identify substantive unreasonableness in a Guidelines sentence."

"Still less are we likely to conclude that a below-Guidelines sentence is substantively unreasonable under the parsimony clause."