Bill Otis, a former AUSA and now an adjunct at Georgetown Law, had a piece earlier this month in the Federalist Society’s magazine Engage titled “The Slow, Sad Swoon of the Sentencing Suggestions.” His article opens with the sentence “The Guidelines are a lost cause.” We were in total agreement...
Too many people are in jail. The rate of incarceration is just going up and up. Is it doing any good? If you look at the two graphs above, you’ll see that the prison population in the United States has soared, while the amount of violent crime has plummeted. The...
We rag on Attorney General Eric Holder from time to time on this blog. For good reason — he’s been something of an idiot on profiling, miranda, terrorism, etc.. But today he did something praiseworthy, and we’d be out of line if we didn’t say so. Last August, Obama...
It’s rare that we agree with a NY Times editorial. Yesterday, we came close. In a blurb titled “Recidivism’s High Cost and a Way to Cut It,” the editors said one solution to the high cost of imprisoning repeat offenders would be to adopt what Oregon’s doing, in letting...
Yesterday, President Obama signed S.1789, the long-awaited sentencing fairness act that reduced the appalling 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. It still doesn’t go all the way to undo the hysteria of the crack epidemic, however. For powder cocaine there’s a 10-year minimum for selling or...
Tonight, we attended a panel discussion on federal sentencing that was actually worth commenting on. Usually, these things are either so basic or insubstantial as to be a waste of time. But this one had a few choice moments we’d thought we’d share with our readers.
The panelists included John Conyers (Chairman of the House judiciary committee), William Sessions (Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and Chief Judge of the District of Vermont), Jonathan Wroblewski (policy director for the DOJ, among other things), Alan Vinegrad (former US Atty for the EDNY and now a white-collar partner at Covington), Tony Ricco (mainstay of the federal defense bar), and Rachel Barkow (NYU professor, didn’t speak much). It was moderated by Judge John Gleeson of the EDNY, and we recognized in the standing-room-only audience a number of distinguished jurists and counsel.
Everyone seems to agree that the Guidelines are in need of a major overhaul. As Judge Gleeson put it, “when even the prosecutors are saying that sentences are too severe… the sentences are too severe.”
But not everyone agrees on what changes ought to be made, how drastic the changes ought to be, or even what’s causing the problems in federal sentencing.
Here’s the take-away: Everyone knows what the right thing to do is. Judges want to do the right thing, regardless of what the Guidelines say. The DOJ forces its prosecutors to do what the Guidelines say, regardless of what they think is just. Congress is incapable of doing the right thing, in its efforts to pander and blame rather than solve. And the Sentencing Commission is afraid to be independent of Congress, preferring instead to make baby steps toward eventually maybe doing the right thing.
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For as long as we’ve been practicing law, everyone has been complaining bitterly about …
2009 New York Drug Sentencing Guide What with all the drug law reforms happening in New York, we thought we’d put together a quick-and-easy guide to what they mean. Click here to view it in PDF form. We used to do this all the time back when we were prosecuting...
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