Setser v. United States

Summary

The Supreme Court held that a federal district court has discretion to order a federal sentence consecutive to an anticipated state sentence not yet imposed, because the multiple-sentences provision of the Sentencing Reform Act regulates rather than exhausts traditional judicial discretion and the Bureau of Prisons' place-of-confinement statute confers no concurrent-versus-consecutive authority. It further held that the state court's later decision to run its two sentences concurrently did not make the federal sentence unreasonable, since reasonableness review asks only whether the district court abused its discretion and the implementation problem stemmed from the state court's choice, not from the sentencing decision itself. The Fifth Circuit's judgment affirming the 151-month sentence was affirmed. Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Kennedy and Ginsburg, dissented, contending that the Act's structure and the sentencing judge's lack of information about future sentences commit the concurrent/consecutive decision to the Bureau of Prisons.