Supreme Court Taps Ex-Alito Clerk To Defend Sentencing Deference

The US Supreme Court named Jones Day partner Anthony J. Dick to defend a 33-year-old precedent that established a rule on when federal courts must defer to commentary in federal sentencing guidelines.

The court, in a brief Wednesday order, tapped Dick, a former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, to brief and argue the position that Stinson v. United States “still correctly states the rule for deference” that courts must give to such commentary.

The request came after the Justice Department agreed with a defendant’s position that the court’s 1993 ruling no longer sets the standard for when courts must to defer to the US Sentencing Commission’s commentary.

The court said in Stinson that commentary explaining a guideline in the Sentencing Commission’s manual ”is authoritative unless it violates the Constitution or a federal statute, or is inconsistent with, or a plainly erroneous reading of, that guideline.”

The justices last month agreed to review that standard in a case linked to a court using an enhanced sentencing range for a felon-in-possession conviction because the defendant’s handgun included what it determined to be a large-capacity magazine.

Kendrick Jarrell Beaird objected to the sentence, claiming that commentary in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines improperly expanded the scope of the actual guidance. He also argued that a 2019 ruling from the court limited the level of deference federal courts must give to agencies’ own interpretations of their regulations.

The Justice Department has argued that the 2019 ruling clarified that deference is owed only “where a federal regulation is ‘genuinely ambiguous.’” But it claimed the Sentencing Commission was still more suited to resolve debates over its guidelines. The dispute is expected to be argued during the 2026-27 term.

The case is Beaird v. United States, U.S., 25-5343 05/06/26.