Sentencing Law and Policy

Terrific review of SCOTUS petitions to watch from folks at In Justice Today

I have previously flagged In Justice Today, a publication of Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project, for its copious coverage of a range of criminal justice issues.  Today, I am flagging this extraordinary lengthy In Justice Today accounting of cert petitions to watch as the Supreme Court gets back in action with this "long conference" this week.  Here is the start and just a small part of this very helpful (and link-filled) review of criminal cases that could make their way to the SCOTUS merits docket:

Starting on Monday, the Court has dozens of criminal justice related certiorari petitions to consider. Here are the ten petitions we’re following closely, which cover issues including civil commitment, sex offender registries, non-unanimous jury verdicts, death in prison sentences for juveniles, the death penalty, prosecutorial misconduct, Double Jeopardy protections, and solitary confinement...

Karsjens v. Piper.  On September 25, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider a class challenge to Minnesota's controversial civil commitment regime, the Minnesota Sex Offender Program....

Snyder v. Doe. Over the past decade, Michigan has created one of the most punitive registry schemes in America....  The State of Michigan filed a petition seeking review of the Sixth Circuit’s legal determination that the retroactive application of the sex offender registration laws constituted ex post facto punishment.

Lambert v. Louisiana. In 48 states, juries in criminal cases must return unanimous verdicts. Louisiana and Oregon are the only exceptions; both states permit convictions when only 10 of 12 jurors find the defendant guilty....  Even though the non-unanimity approach only prevails in two jurisdictions, the case arrives at the Court with significant momentum....

Johnson v. Idaho. This term, the Court will have the opportunity to address the question left open in Miller: whether “the Eighth Amendment requires a categorical bar on life without parole for juveniles.” 567 U.S. at 469. In Johnson v. Idaho, the petitioner, Sarah Johnson, challenges the constitutionality of juvenile life-without-parole (JLWOP)....

Ohio v. Moore. In Ohio v. Moore, the State of Ohio is challenging the Ohio Supreme Court’s conclusion that Graham’s prohibition on life-without-parole sentences for juveniles who commit non-homicide offenses also forecloses a term-of-years prison sentence, imposed for multiple non-homicide crimes, that exceeds the juvenile’s life expectancy....

Three other pending petitions — Willbanks v. Missouri Department of Corrections, Garza v. Nebraska, and Castaneda v. Nebraska — present essentially the same question, albeit from the opposite posture. In each, the petitioner challenged the constitutionality of his lengthy aggregate term-of-years sentence, imposed consecutively for several different felony offenses....

Hidalgo v. Arizona. Abel Daniel Hidalgo has asked the Court to consider the constitutionality of Arizona’s death penalty scheme, both in light of its failure to meaningfully narrow the class of murders that are death-eligible and because evolving standards of decency show that, as a categorical matter, the death penalty is unconstitutional....

Farnan v. Walker asks the Court to resolve questions about qualified immunity in the context of prison officials making determinations that a prisoner should be placed in solitary confinement....

On eve of federal sentencing, any final predictions (or desires) for Anthony Weiner's punishment for underage sexting?

As previewed in prior posts linked below and as set up in this new AP piece, the next chapter (and I fear not the last) in the sordid sorry story of Anthony Weiner will play out tomorrow in a federal court in New York.  Here are the basics:

It seemed as if Anthony Weiner had hit rock bottom when he resigned from Congress in 2011. "Bye-bye, pervert!" one heckler shouted as the Democrat quit amid revelations that he had sent graphic pictures of himself to women on social media. Time has shown his self-destructive drama had only just begun.

Weiner, 53, is set to be sentenced Monday for sending obscene material to a 15-year-old girl in a case that may have also have played a role in costing Hillary Clinton — former boss of Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin — the presidential election.

Federal prosecutors have asked for a sentence of slightly more than two years behind bars because of the seriousness of the crime, in which Weiner sent adult porn to the girl and got her to take her clothes off for him on Skype. "The defendant did far more than exchange typed words on a lifeless cellphone screen with a faceless stranger," prosecutors wrote to the judge. "Transmitting obscenity to a minor to induce her to engage in sexually explicit conduct by video chat and photo — is far from mere 'sexting.'"

But Weiner's attorneys contend he is a changed man who has finally learned his lesson, calling his compulsive sexting a "deep sickness" best treated without time behind bars. The memo also suggested Weiner himself was a victim of the scandal, saying the North Carolina high school student initiated contact with him because she "hoped somehow to influence the U.S. presidential election" and write a tell-all book.

I have just had a chance to review this short sentencing memo that the government filed a few days ago. I found remarkable both the stupidity of Weiner's decision to "sext" with in an obviously underage girl, as well as the government's conclusion that applicable guideline calculations produce "offense level of 33 [meaning] the resulting Guidelines range would be 135 to 168 months’ imprisonment, but for the statutory maximum of 120 months’ imprisonment."  Luckily for Weiner, the "the Government agreed that a sentence within the range of 21 to 27 months’ imprisonment (which would be the applicable Guidelines range without application of the cross-references) would be fair and appropriate under the specific circumstances of this case."  And the Government makes this assertion in support of a prison sentence in that range: "Weiner’s demonstrated history of professed, yet failed, reform make it difficult to rely on his present claim of self-awareness and transformation. On this record, a custodial sentence is necessary to truly effect specific deterrence and prevent the defendant from committing this crime in the future."

Meanwhile, in his lengthy sentencing memo includes, in its words, "Anthony’s own deeply personal meditation to the Court on sickness and recovery (Exhibit 1 to this submission) that speaks most powerfully to his progress."  It also asserts, I think accurately, that Weiner's "wrongful conduct is on orders of magnitude less egregious than any case involving sexually explicit communications with a teenager that has ever been prosecuted in this district" and that "factors the Court must consider under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) — in isolation and taken together — demonstrate that a sentence of imprisonment is not required here and would result in punishment greater than necessary to achieve the goals of sentencing."

So, dear reader, what do you expect Anthony Weiner will get at sentencing?  I tend predict a "split the difference" outcome in cases like this, so I would be inclined to expect a sentence of a year and a day for him.  Something even a bit shorter would not surprise me, and I would actually be surprised if Weiner got anything more than 21 months.  In the end, at least for me, I have a hard time viewing Weiner's extraordinary stupidity as the involving the kind of evil or danger that really justifies a long federal prison term. 

Prior related posts:

• You be the federal judge: what sentence for former Rep Anthony Weiner for "transferring obscene material to a minor"? 
• In sentencing filing, Anthony Weiner asks for probation and community service after guilty plea to transferring obscene material to a minor 
• Federal prosecutors say Anthony Weiner merits years in prison for his online sexual offense 

"Mitigating America’s Mass Incarceration Crisis Without Compromising Community Protection: Expanding the Role of Rehabilitation in Sentencing"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper posted to SSRN authored by Mirko Bagaric, Gabrielle Wolf and William Rininger. Here is the abstract:

The United States is in the midst of an unprecedented mass incarceration crisis.  Financially, this is no longer readily sustainable, even for the world’s largest economy.  Further, the human suffering that prison causes is no longer tolerable from the normative perspective.  Nevertheless, lawmakers have failed to propose or adopt coherent or wide-ranging reforms to mitigate this crisis.  The crisis has emerged over the past forty years largely as a result of the emphasis on community protection as the most important objective of sentencing and the fact that the primary means of pursuing community protection during this period has been incapacitation in the form of imprisonment.

In this Article, we argue that policy makers and courts took a profoundly wrong turn by equating community protection almost solely with incapacitation.  A more progressive and often effective means of protecting the community is by rehabilitating offenders.  In theory, rehabilitation is a widely endorsed sentencing objective, so it should already influence many sentencing outcomes, but the reality is otherwise.  Rehabilitation is rarely a dominant or even weighty consideration when courts sentence offenders.  This is attributable, at least in part, to skepticism regarding the capacity of criminal sanctions to reform offenders.  This approach is flawed.  Empirical data establishes that many offenders can be rehabilitated.

In this Article, we argue that sentencing courts should place greater weight on the objective of rehabilitation and that such a change would significantly ameliorate the incarceration crisis, while enhancing community safety. We make three key recommendations in order to implement our proposal.  First, it is necessary to promulgate rehabilitation as a means of protecting the community.  Second, we propose that the role of rehabilitation in sentencing should be expanded.  In particular, and contrary to current orthodoxy, rehabilitation should have a meaningful role even in relation to very serious offenses.  In indicating the role that rehabilitation has played in their decisions, courts should clearly articulate how they have adjusted penalties in light of assessments of offenders’ potential for rehabilitation. Third, it is necessary to ensure that decisions by courts relating to the prospects of rehabilitation are made on the basis of more rigorous, empirically-grounded and transparent criteria.

To this end, we examine the under-researched topic of the role that instruments that predict the likelihood of an offender’s recidivism should play in guiding sentencing decisions.  The solutions advanced in this Article will provide the catalyst for rehabilitation to assume a much larger role in sentencing and thereby significantly ameliorate the incarceration crisis.

Discussing opioid epidemic, AG Sessions says he is "convinced this is a winnable war"

I have never been too keen on using war rhetoric to describe any activities other than actual war, and I was struck by the phrase quoted in the title of this post appearing toward the end of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' latest speech about the opioid epidemic.  Here is an excerpt from the close of the speech as prepared for delivery to law enforcement in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:

[T]o help fight the overprescribing of opioid painkillers, I announced last month that we will allocate new resources to find and prosecute the fraudsters who help flood our streets with drugs.

The first new resource is a data analytics program at the Department called the Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit. This team will help us find the tell-tale signs of opioid-related health care fraud by identifying statistical outliers. Fraudsters might lie, but the numbers don’t.

The second is that I’ve assigned 12 experienced prosecutors to focus solely on investigating and prosecuting opioid-related health care fraud cases in a dozen “hot-spot” locations around the country -- places where they are especially needed. And one of those will be in Western Pennsylvania.

And, today, I am announcing that we will be awarding nearly $20 million in federal grants to help law enforcement and public health agencies address prescription drug and opioid abuse. This is an urgent problem and we are making it a top priority. I believe that these new resources and new efforts will make a difference, bring more criminals to justice, and ultimately save lives.

And I’m convinced this is a winnable war.

But in order to end this crisis, we must work together. Eighty-five percent of all law enforcement officers serve at the state and local level, and your work is essential to our success. Strengthening partnerships between law enforcement officers at all levels is a central theme of my tenure at the DOJ, and I hope you will help me do that.  Each of you has a difficult job, but it is a job worth doing, and a job that your communities are depending upon. And you can know this: you have our thanks, and we have your back.

"Legal vs. Factual Normative Questions & the True Scope of Ring"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Emad Atiq available via SSRN. Here is the abstract:

When is a normative question a question of law rather than a question of fact?  The short answer, based on common law and constitutional rulings, is: it depends.  For example, if the question concerns the fairness of contractual terms, it is a question of law.  If it concerns the reasonableness of dangerous risk-taking in a negligence suit, it is a question of fact.  If it concerns the obscenity of speech, it was a question of fact prior to the Supreme Court’s seminal cases on free speech during the 1970s, but is now treated as law-like. This variance in the case law cannot be explained by traditional accounts of the law/fact distinction and has fueled recent skepticism about the possibility of gleaning a coherent principle from judicial rulings.

This Article clarifies a principle implicit in the settled classifications.  I suggest that judicial practice is consistent: it can be explained by the distinction between normative questions that are convention-dependent and those that are convention-independent.  Convention-dependent normative questions, or those that turn essentially on facts about conventions (roughly, what we do around here) are reasonably classified as questions of law.  By contrast, convention-independent normative questions, which turn primarily on fundamental moral norms, are properly classified as questions of fact.  This principle, echoed in recent holdings, clarifies law/fact classifications in such diverse areas as torts, contracts, First Amendment law and criminal procedure.

The principle also promises to resolve a looming constitutional controversy.  In Ring v Arizona, the Supreme Court held that all factual findings that increase a capital defendant’s sentence must be decided by the jury under the 6th Amendment.  Two recent denials of cert. suggest that members of the Court wish to revisit, in light of Ring, the constitutionality of judges deciding whether a criminal defendant deserves the death penalty.  Applying the principle to Ring, I argue that the question of death-deservingness is a convention-independent normative question, and for that reason should be deemed a factual question for the jury.

Ohio intermediate appeals court, finding functional LWOP sentence excessive for multiple burglaries, cuts 50 years off term

A helpful former student alerted me to an interesting state appeals court ruling in my own backyard handed down last week. Even though the ruling in State v. Gwynne, 2017-Ohio-7570 (5th Dist. Sept. 11, 2017) (available here), is pretty brief, the issues raised by both the case facts and the state appeals ruling could occupy an entire modern sentencing course. Here are some snippets that should prompt sentencing fans to check out the full opinion:

Defendant-Appellant [stole] from at least 12 different nursing homes and assisted living facilities in both Delaware and Franklin counties over the course of eight years. Detectives were unable to connect all of the property to its rightful owners. During part of appellant’s spree, she was employed as a nurse’s aide.  After she was fired for suspicion of theft, however, she continued to dress as a nurse’s aide, in order to enter nursing homes and steal from residents while appearing to be a legitimate employee....

At the change of plea hearing, appellant admitted that she had been stealing from nursing home residents since 2004, four years earlier than the earliest charge in the indictment.  Some residents she knew and worked with, others she did not.  She claimed a cocaine habit was to blame, and that she took cash as well as other items to sell to support her habit.

At the sentencing hearing held on November 7, 2016, the trial court indicated it had reviewed the PSI, sentencing memoranda from the state and appellant, as well as the victim impact statements.  The state recommended 42 years incarceration.  Counsel for appellant advocated for intensive supervision community control, and a period of time in a community based correctional facility.

After considering all of the applicable sentencing statutes, and making all of the required findings, the trial court imposed a sentence of three years for each of the 15 second degree felony burglaries, 12 months for each of the third degree felony thefts, 12 months for each of the fourth degree felony thefts, and 180 days for each first degree misdemeanor receiving stolen property.  The court ordered appellant to serve the felony sentences consecutively, and the misdemeanor sentences concurrently for an aggregate of 65 years incarceration....

Appellant was 55 years old at the time of her sentencing....

We do not minimize the seriousness of appellant's conduct. On this record, however, we find the stated prison term of 65 years does not comply with the purposes and principals of felony sentencing....  A sentence of 65 is plainly excessive.  It can be affirmatively stated that a 65 year sentence is a life sentence for appellant.  Even a sentence of 20 years, considering the purposes and principles of sentencing and weighed against the factual circumstances of this case, would seem excessive.

The sentence is an emotional response to very serious and reprehensible conduct.  However, the understandably strong feelings must be tempered by a sanction clearly and convincingly based upon the record to effectuate the purposes of sentencing.  The sentence imposed here does not do so.  It is disproportionate to the conduct and the impact on any and all of the victims either individually or collectively.  It runs the risk of lessening public respect for the judicial system.  The imposition of a 65 year sentence for a series of non-violent theft offenses for a first-time felon shocks the consciousness.  We therefore find by clear and convincing evidence that the record does not support the sentence.....

We agree, however, with the trial court’s findings relating to the necessity of a prison sentence, and that consecutive sentences are warranted.  We therefore modify appellant’s sentence pursuant to R.C. 2953.08(G)(2) ... [to reach] an aggregate term of 15 years of incarceration.  Given the facts of this case, we find 15 years incarceration consistent with the principles and purposes of sentencing.

Though much can be said about this case, the scope of imprisonment considered at every level of this case startles me and yet I fear startles few others. Prosecutors, even after getting a plea, claimed that this woman at age 55 needed to be subject to 42 years incarceration, at the end of which she would be 97 years old.  The judge apparently decided that was not harsh enough, and thus imposed a sentence that would run until this woman was 130!  Thanks to an unusual appeals court ruling, this defendant now has to be grateful she will only be imprisoned until age 70.  Wowsa.

Federal prosecutors say Anthony Weiner merits years in prison for his online sexual offense

As reported in this AP piece, headlined "Government: Prison fits Weiner's sex crime on teen victim," federal prosecutors have filed their sentencing recommendation in the Anthony Weiner case. Here are the details:

Former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner is more than a serial digital philanderer — he's a danger to the public who deserves two years in prison for encouraging a 15-year-old girl to engage in online sex acts, prosecutors told a judge Wednesday. A Manhattan judge is scheduled to sentence the New York Democrat on Monday for transferring obscene material to a minor.

The government urged the judge to put Weiner's claims of a therapeutic awakening in a context of a man who made similar claims after embarrassing, widely publicized interactions with adult women before encountering the teenager online in January 2016. Prosecutors said his conduct "suggests a dangerous level of denial and lack of self-control."

"This is not merely a 'sexting' case," prosecutors wrote. "The defendant did far more than exchange typed words on a lifeless cellphone screen with a faceless stranger. ... Transmitting obscenity to a minor to induce her to engage in sexually explicit conduct by video chat and photo — is far from mere 'sexting.' Weiner's criminal conduct was very serious, and the sentence imposed should reflect that seriousness."

Weiner, 53, said in a submission last week that he's undergoing treatment and is profoundly sorry for subjecting the North Carolina high school student to what his lawyers called his "deep sickness." Prosecutors attacked some of Weiner's arguments for seeking leniency and noted his full awareness beforehand of his crime, citing his co-sponsorship in January 2007 of a bill to require sex offenders to register their email and instant message addresses with the National Sex Offender Registry....

The government said Weiner's "widely-reported prior scandals" were not criminal in nature and did not involve minors but should be considered at sentencing because they reveal a familiar pattern. "He initially denied his conduct; he suffered personal and professional consequences; he publicly apologized and claimed reform. Yet, he has, on multiple occasions, continued to engage in the very conduct he swore off, progressing from that which is self-destructive to that which is also destructive to a teenage girl," prosecutors said.  They added: "Weiner's demonstrated history of professed, yet failed, reform make it difficult to rely on his present claim of self-awareness and transformation."

Defense lawyers had portrayed the girl as an aggressor, saying she wanted to generate material for a book and possibly influence the presidential election. Prosecutors responded that Weiner should be sentenced for what he did, and his victim's motives should not influence his punishment. A defense lawyer declined to comment Wednesday.

In a plea bargain, Weiner has agreed not to appeal any sentence between 21 and 27 months.  Prosecutors said the sentence should fall within that span, and they noted that Probation Office authorities had recommended a 27-month prison term.

Prior related posts:

• You be the federal judge: what sentence for former Rep Anthony Weiner for "transferring obscene material to a minor"? 
• In sentencing filing, Anthony Weiner asks for probation and community service after guilty plea to transferring obscene material to a minor 

Interesting account of gender discrimination in Wyoming alternative sentencing boot camp program

In part because women are a disproportionately small share of criminal offenders, they can experience a disproportionately large share of discriminatory treatment in the operation of criminal justice systems.  An interesting example of this reality comes from this new BuzzFeed News article headlined "Women Are Spending Years In Prison Because Wyoming Won’t Let Them Into Its All-Male Boot Camp."  The piece's subheadline provide a summary of the story: "Taylor Blanchard faced up to 10 years in prison for a crime that would’ve sent men to boot camp for six months to a year. Her fight could change the fate of countless women in Wyoming."  Here are excerpts:

For the past three months, 23-year-old Blanchard had been trying to get into [boot camp] programs.  The one in her home state, Wyoming, lasts six months to a year.  People who finish it successfully can then ask a judge to transfer them into probation, a halfway house, or placement with a family member, effectively shaving years of prison time off their sentences.

Blanchard ticked all the boxes for acceptance, except for one.  The Wyoming Department of Corrections has never housed a woman in boot camp, and it wasn’t going to start with her. Which is how Blanchard ended up in Florida, shipped out of state instead of accommodated in her own. And it’s how she became the central figure in a federal lawsuit accusing the WDOC of discriminating against female inmates.

Across the country, women in prisons and jails are often housed in different conditions than their male peers.  The criminal justice system was built for men, and prison activists say that little thought has been given to providing equal services — much less special considerations — for women, even as their population has ballooned in recent decades....

Wyoming’s boot camp, formally called the Youthful Offenders Program at the Wyoming Honor Conservation Camp, is known widely among public defenders. Open to first-time offenders under 25, the program is made up of “physical training, drill and ceremony, and a paramilitary base program focusing on appearance, life skills, and behavior,” according to the state; about half of those who enter boot camp complete the program successfully.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, [Blanchard’s court-appointed attorney, John] LaBuda called it a “really good program,” one that teaches discipline but also allows inmates to get their GED or drug and alcohol counseling, or sometimes learn a trade. But when the state first offered the program in 1987, it only housed men; that has continued for 30 years. No attorney or judge, to the state or anyone else’s knowledge, has ever tried to place a female client into the boot camp....

In July, [Blanchard’s civil] lawyers filed suit in federal court, alleging the WDOC was violating her constitutional rights by denying her an opportunity offered to men. [John Robinson and Stephen] Pevar also had the idea to turn Blanchard’s case into a class-action lawsuit. As Pevar wrote in a July email to WDOC lawyers, “Wyoming was not only violating Ms Blanchard’s rights but has been violating the rights of women for many years now who are in her situation. We needed to do something about it.” (In 2013, the ACLU settled a similar lawsuit that opened up a Montana prison boot camp to women, though the program is now ending for both men and women.)

The lawsuit’s proposed class includes current inmates at Lusk’s women’s prison who were first-time offenders under 25 at the time of their sentencing — women who were eligible to be recommended to the Youthful Offenders Program but weren’t given the chance because of the boot camp’s men-only tradition. The proposed class also includes young Wyoming women who will face the same situation in the future. But Pevar doesn’t yet know how many women actually fall under this umbrella, if a judge does approve the lawsuit as a class action. He and Robinson have requested the WDOC reveal the names of eligible women currently at Lusk, a prison with a capacity of 293 women. WDOC has not yet provided these names. Blanchard’s attorneys are also trying to get referrals from public defenders like LaBuda currently representing eligible young women.

The class could end up being 20 people or it could be 200, Pevar said, but the goal is for each woman to get put into boot camp, either immediately or by going back in front of their sentencing judges. (The WDOC would provide each woman with an independent attorney for the latter proposed process.) “We feel that's the only fair way to vindicate the Constitutional rights of the women whose lawyers didn't ask for the recommendation,” Pevar said. No monetary award for the women is involved.

In late August, the WDOC filed a motion to dismiss the suit, arguing that women have never been denied the opportunity to go to bootcamp. It’s just that they’ve never tried to go to bootcamp, it said, until Blanchard. The corrections department also argued Blanchard hadn’t exhausted all of remedies before filing suit, and that her complaint is moot because she’s already been placed in boot camp elsewhere.

"Does barring sex offenders from church violate RFRA?"

The title of this post is the title of this interesting new article in the Indiana Lawyer discussing interesting litigation working through the Indiana courts. Here is how the piece gets started:

Shortly after the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act went into effect in Indiana in 2015, the unlawful entry by a serious sex offender statute, which prohibits certain sex offenders from accessing school property, also became law. Now, those two statutes are at odds with each other as the Indiana Court of Appeals decides whether an interpretation of the statute that prohibits three men from going to church constitutes a RFRA violation.

Under the unlawful entry by a serious sex offender statute, Indiana Code 35-42-4-14, offenders convicted of certain sex offenses cannot knowingly or intentionally enter school property without committing a Level 6 felony. The Boone County sheriff determined that statute meant sex offenders in the county, including John Does 1, 2 and 3, could not attend church if their churches offered programs for children at least 3 years old who are not yet in kindergarten. The Boone Superior Court agreed, determining that anytime churches offer such programs, they are considered “school property,” and, thus, are unavailable to the John Does.

But because each of their churches offer children’s programming simultaneously or nearly simultaneously with adult services or Bible studies, the three men told the Indiana Court of Appeals during oral arguments in the case of John Doe, et al. v. The Boone County Prosecutor, et al., 06A01-1612-PL-02741, the sheriff’s letter effectively prohibits them from attending church at any time. The appellate case turns on two central issues that divided counsel for the state and the offenders: whether churches can be considered “school property” and whether the prohibition against the Does attending church violates their rights under RFRA.

"Jeff Sessions’s evidence-free crime strategy"

The title of this post is the headline of this new Hill commentary authored by prominent criminologist David Kennedy. Here are excerpts: 

The emerging Department of Justice crime-control strategy is a criminologist’s nightmare. Over the last thirty years researchers, law enforcement leaders and communities have pushed for smarter, better violence prevention — spurred in large part by the incredible violence and community destruction of the crack era, and the utter failure of existing approaches to do anything about it.

It’s paid dividends. We now know a lot about what works and what doesn’t. That knowledge begins, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions himself says, with the fact that “the vast majority of people just want to obey the law and live their lives. A disproportionate amount of crime is committed by a small group of criminals.”

That’s exactly right. The most important discovery about violence in the last decades is that it’s what Harvard University researcher Thomas Abt calls “sticky.” Studies in city after city show that very small, active networks of extraordinarily high-risk victims and offenders — about one-half of 1 percent of the population — are associated with 60 percent to 75 percent of all homicide, and that 5 percent or so of blocks and street corners is similarly associated. And while many people use drugs, those involved in meaningful drug distribution — particularly the most active and violent of them — are also relatively few.

So what should we to do about this “small group of criminals?” It’s a critical question. Sessions has called for a return to the “war on drugs” menu — more law enforcement, mandatory minimums and long sentences, even the anti-drug D.A.R.E. program — plus a new focus on heavy immigration enforcement and a withdrawal from DOJ attention to police misconduct. But we now know for a fact that these things don’t work, and can actually make matters worse.

To understand why, and to see what does work, we should look to the groundbreaking front-line police and community actors who have been developing creative solutions that are more effective, less harmful and profoundly more respectful of traumatized and alienated communities than the old and demonstrably ineffective and discredited menu. They’re embracing new ways of focusing community engagement, social services and law enforcement to both protect and ensure accountability amongst Sessions’ “small group of criminals.” Work I’ve been involved in has law enforcement, community leaders and service providers sit down face-to-face with gang members and drug dealers, emphasize that the community hates the violence, offer to help anybody who wants it and explain the legal risks that come with violence. The result can be dramatic reductions in both violence and enforcement....

The best new crime prevention work recognizes the absolute centrality of what scholars call “legitimacy” — the community perception that authorities are respectful, unbiased, well-intentioned and have the standing to expect compliance. Breaking the bond between communities and the law does profound damage. As legitimacy goes down, crime reporting and cooperation with police and prosecutors go down, and violence goes up. Recognizing the absolute centrality of trust, police are backing away from stop-and- frisk and “zero tolerance” and working hard to reduce police violence and enhance accountability.

The opposite is clearly happening now in Hispanic communities, newly terrified of immigration enforcement: Houston police chief Art Acevedo says robbery, assault, and rape reporting by Hispanic communities are all down, the latter by 43 percent. The administration’s new policies may in fact be creating a safety net for predators....

And draconian sentencing — despite its frequent common-sense appeal — simply isn’t that effective. Violent crime is overwhelmingly a young man’s game, and long sentences just keep prisoners locked up well after they would have stopped of their own accord: a Stanford study shows that three-strikes “lifers” released recently under California prison reform had a 1.3 percent recidivism rate, against nearly 45 percent for other California inmates. They don’t deter that well, in part because criminals discount their futures just like middle-class home buyers do: offenders have been found to view a 20-year prison sentence as only about six times as severe as a one-year stint. Offenders frequently don’t know that the massive federal sentences they may be exposed to even exist until they’re charged and it’s much too late.

Enforcement has also proved utterly pointless with respect to drug markets, where locked-up dealers are easily replaced by new ones. The drug war was incapable of keeping drugs out of the country, from being produced domestically or from being sold and bought freely. It’s unlikely to do better in an age of fentanyl mail-ordered over the dark web. And as for D.A.R.E. — words fail. Criminologists are a cranky bunch, but there’s one thing that they all agree on: D.A.R.E. doesn’t work. By peddling misinformation about the dangers of drug use and telling huge numbers of impressionable kids that drugs and drug use are everywhere, the program can even increase abuse.

We need effective crime reduction strategies, just as we did in the '80s: Even before some cities recently started to see recent increases in homicide, violence suffered by poor minority communities — especially, young black men — was at intolerable levels. The opioid epidemic is hitting the country so hard it is reversing historic gains in life expectancy. We know enough to do better this time. We should do so, not willfully repeat the glaring and horrific mistakes of the recent past.

It's Alive!!: Senators Grassley and Durbin talking about reintroducing federal Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act

Roughly two years ago, when Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley secured a 15-5 vote in committee to move forward the bipartisan Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (remember that?), I was for a brief period optimistic about the possibility of significant reform to the federal sentencing system.  Regular readers may recall my skepticism about the prospect of major statutory sentencing reform back in summer 2013 when some were eager to believe, in the words one commentator, that "momentum for sentencing reform could be unstoppable."  But once Senators Grassley got on board and shepherded the SRCA though the Senate Judiciary Committee, I really started to think big reform really could happen.  But, of course, a host of predictable and unpredictable forces stopped significant federal statutory sentencing from ever becoming an Obama era reality.

I provide this backstory because it should temper any significant excitement from this new news release from Senator Grassley headlined "Senators to Reintroduce Landmark Criminal Justice Reform Package."  Here are the basics (with my emphasis added):

The bipartisan authors of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act are preparing to reintroduce their comprehensive legislation to review prison sentences for certain nonviolent drug offenders, reduce recidivism, and save taxpayer dollars.  The legislation, led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, improves judicial discretion at sentencing for low level offenders and helps inmates successfully reenter society, while tightening penalties for violent criminals and preserving key prosecutorial tools for law enforcement.  The senators plan to reintroduce the bill as they continue to work with stakeholders to make additional updates.

“Last Congress, we worked in a bipartisan manner to develop a proposal that empowers judges, saves taxpayer dollars and gives low-level, non-violent offenders another shot at rejoining the productive side of society. Since that time, we’ve been meeting with colleagues and stakeholders to improve the bill and grow support.  While the political landscape in Washington has changed, the same problems presented by the current sentencing regime remain, and we will continue to work with colleagues in Congress and the administration, as well as advocates and members of the law enforcement community, to find a comprehensive solution to ensure justice for both the victims and the accused, and support law enforcement in their mission to keep our communities safe,” Grassley said.

“This legislation is the product of more than five years of work on criminal justice reform,” said Durbin. “It’s also the best chance in a generation to right the wrongs of a badly broken system.  The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on earth.  Mandatory minimum sentences were once seen as a strong deterrent. In reality they have too often been unfair, fiscally irresponsible and a threat to public safety. Given tight budgets and overcrowded prison cells, our country must reform these outdated and ineffective laws that have cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. We believe this legislation would pass the Senate with a strong bipartisan vote — it’s time to get this done.”

The fact that a new version of the SRCA has not yet been introduced, and that Senator Grassley is talking about working with stakeholders to improve the bill in light of the changed political landscape, has me thinking that some interesting moves my be afoot in an effort to get this bill finally to a floor vote. I think Senator Durbin is quite right that a thoughtful federal statutory sentencing reform bill will get a strong bipartisan vote if it gets to the floor. The big question is whether a new version of the SCRA can get to the Senator floor anytime soon.

"Jeff Sessions may have been a fine Senator, but he has proven to be a feckless Attorney General."

The title of this post is a sentence from the first part of  this lengthy commentary by Gregg Jarrett at Fox News headlined "Sessions should resign, but not before taking action against Clinton, Comey and Rice."  The bulk of the commentary makes the case for bringing criminal cases against Hilary Clinton, James Comey and Susan Rice, and here is how it starts and ends:

Jeff Sessions should never have accepted the position of Attorney General of the United States. His leadership has proven unproductive and ineffectual....

Jeff Sessions either wittingly or unwittingly bungled his confirmation hearing, which led to the recusal that is said to have angered Trump and alienated the AG from the president. Regardless, Sessions’ performance as Attorney General ever since has been notable only for a series of failures to act when action is demanded.

The moment the President of the United States no longer has confidence in his Attorney General, it is time for him to submit his letter of resignation. But first, Sessions can restore integrity to the Department of Justice and salvage his own tattered reputation by taking aggressive action against Comey, Clinton and Rice.

Then he should quietly bow out.

"Advancing Justice: An Agenda for Human Dignity & Public Safety"

The title of this post is the title of this all-day event taking place next month (October 26) in Washington DC. The event is sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute and Charles Koch Foundation, and here is how this registration page briefly describes the event:

Criminal justice and policing reforms have made tremendous gains at both the state and federal level in the last several years.  However, the ongoing opioid crisis, questions around violent crime, and continued police militarization show us that there is still much to be done.

On Thursday, October 26, please join the Charles Koch Institute for a one-day conference in Washington, D.C. to identify the next set of criminal justice reform priorities, and showcase a broad coalition of policy makers, academics, think tanks, and community activists who've helped bring us this far.  Together, we are committed to supporting the best ideas and lending our voice to the national conversation for an advancement in human dignity and greater public safety. We hope you can join us.

I am honored to be one of the speakers at this event, and this speakers page details the impressive array of individuals who will be participating. I will be on a break-out panel titled "A Fight over Federalism: The Future of Marijuana Policy." Here are a few other panel titles that ought to be of interest to sentencing fans:

• "Turning Ideas into Action: Governors Redefine ‘Tough on Crime’"
• "True Justice: Restoring Victims of Crime"
• "Ripe for Reform? Challenges and Opportunities in the States"
• "Removing Re-Entry Barriers: How Expanding Opportunity Drives Public Safety"
• "Optimism and Obstacles: The Future of Federal Sentencing Reform"

Can an assistant public defender in California make nearly $300,000 per year?

Upon seeing this local article, headlined "Taxpayer cost for mass murderer Scott Dekraai’s case tops $2.5 million," I was starting to do a post on the high costs of problematic capital cases in California. (Regular readers may recall that the Dekraai case made headlines last month, as blogged here, when Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals excluded the death penalty as a punishment option due to law enforcement misconduct linked to a jail informant program.)  Here is how that article gets started:

If all goes as expected, the worst mass killer in Orange County history, Scott Dekraai, will be sentenced Friday, Sept. 22, to eight terms of life without parole, one term each for the people he fatally shot in Seal Beach six years ago.

But the sentence comes with a relatively high price tag after a judge rejected the death penalty and concluded local prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies had engaged in misconduct, according to records and interviews. As of Sept. 6, the Dekraai case has cost taxpayers at least $2.5 million, according to an analysis by the Southern California News Group.

But the question now in this title of this post emerges from my back-of-the-envelop assessment of this line item in cost analysis appearing in the article: "Assistant public defender Scott Sanders – $842,635: 50 percent of his total compensation, adjusted yearly, for five years and 10 months." If I am understanding this line item, it suggest that an assistant public defender received "total compensation" of nearly $1.7 million in less than six years, which amounts to annual salary of nearly $300,000. Though I will never begrudge a good lawyer making a good salary, the prospect of a public defender making this much on a yearly basis would certainly undermine the notion that all public defenders are over-worked and under-paid.

Because a quick web search brings up data suggesting that the average public defender annual salary in LA is more like $97,000, I am thinking there is something hinky in the numbers being used for accounting the costs of the Dekraai case.  And, perhaps even more to the point, this article with or without accounting errors, highlights how hard it is to really properly assess the complete costs to taxpayers of our criminal justice systems.

Pushing back on criticisms of AG Sessions returning Justice Department to "failed mindset of its past"

In this post last week, I noted the National Review commentary authored by two former US Attorneys which focused on the Sessions charging/sentencing memo to complain that "Attorney General Jeff Sessions has returned the Justice Department to the failed mindset of its past."  I now have just noticed that Andrew McCarthy has penned this lengthy response at National Review under the headline "On Criminal Justice, Sessions Is Returning DOJ to the Rule of Law."  Here is an excerpt:

The authors lament that Sessions has reinstituted guidelines requiring prosecutors “to charge the most serious offenses and ask for the lengthiest prison sentences.” This, the authors insist, is a “one-size-fits-all policy” that “doesn’t work.” It marks a return to the supposedly “ineffective and damaging criminal-justice policies that were imposed in 2003,” upsetting the “bipartisan consensus” for “criminal-justice reform” that has supposedly seized “today’s America.”

This is so wrongheaded, it’s tough to decide where to begin.  In reality, what Sessions has done is return the Justice Department to the traditional guidance articulated nearly four decades ago by President Carter’s highly regarded attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti (and memorialized in the U.S. Attorney’s Manual).  It instructs prosecutors to charge the most serious, readily provable offense under the circumstances. Doesn’t work? This directive, in effect with little variation until the Obama years, is one of several factors that contributed to historic decreases in crime. When bad guys are prosecuted and incarcerated, they are not preying on our communities.

The thrust of the policy Sessions has revived is respect for the Constitution’s bedrock separation-of-powers principle. It requires faithful execution of laws enacted by Congress.... Absent this Justice Department directive that prosecutors must charge the most serious, readily provable offense, the executive branch becomes a law unto itself.  Bending congressional statutes to the executive’s policy preferences was the Obama approach to governance, so we should not be surprised that a pair of his appointed prosecutors see it as a model for criminal enforcement, too.  But it is not enforcement of the law.  It is executive imperialism....

Criminal statutes can be modified by legislation, which reflects the judgment of the people’s representatives.  The fact that they have not been, notwithstanding the purported “consensus” for “reform,” suggests that the public is not convinced of the need for such modification — or, perhaps, that our representatives grasp the need for a check on the judges. Unable to change the law, the “reformers” are reduced to arguing that justice happens only when prosecutors ignore the law.  If you’re Jeff Sessions and you say, “No, you know, I think we’ll have them follow the law,” you’re a Neanderthal....

Vance and Stewart have a point when they object to Attorney General Sessions’s unfortunate fondness for what they call “adoptive forfeiture policies.”  As we at National Review have contended (as has Justice Clarence Thomas, Kevin Williamson reminds us), civil asset forfeitures are property seizures without due process of law.  A federal spoils system incentivizes police to grab with both hands. Regardless of their effectiveness against drug lords, such forfeitures should be halted — the police should be required to proceed by criminal forfeiture and prosecution, with the due-process safeguards that entails. But that is because civil forfeitures offend the Constitution, not because they feed a left-wing narrative about fractured police–community relations.

Attorney General Sessions is enforcing the law, and doing so within a noble Justice Department tradition of giving force to Congress’s expression of the public will.  He is not altering the law by executive fiat, the preference of President Obama, Attorneys General Holder and Lynch, Professor Vance, Mr. Stewart, and the bipartisan minority they portray as a “consensus.”

There is a great deal I don’t like about the legal system either.  Statist government has enacted far too many laws, such that the federal government has criminalized too much of what used to be the province of state regulation — or unregulated private behavior.  The drug laws do have severe penalties and may work injustice in some cases — although fewer than Vance and Stewart suggest: Though the hands of federal judges are tied by mandatory minimums, they are not bound to follow advisory sentencing guidelines or prosecutorial recommendations.  I would certainly be open to mitigating penalties in exchange for thinning out the federal penal code and transferring areas of enforcement responsibility back to the states.  The point, however, is that this has to be done by legislation, not by executive autocrats under a stealthy distortion of prosecutorial discretion.

If Professor Vance and Mr. Stewart are right that we are in a new era, if the public has truly been won over to the notion that incarcerating criminals is counterproductive, the next step is very simple: Pass laws that amend the penal code.  In the meantime, the Justice Department’s job is to enforce the laws we have.  As Attorney General Sessions recognizes, that means charging the most serious, readily provable offense.

There is more to this commentary, and it merits a full read.  I have emphasized the points about the rule of law and the distinct roles of the distinct branches because it stands as the most conceptually principled defense of the Sessions Memo on prosecutorial policies.  At the same time, this defense lack a bit of nuance in failing to acknowledge that a large measure of congressional dysfunction, rather than the obvious will of the people, is precluding amendments to the federal penal code.

In red and blue states nationwide for nearly a decade, in various initiative votes from California to Oklahoma and from Alaska to Florida, the American people and their representative have been amending penal codes to be less harsh in many ways (especially to nonviolent offenders and marijuana users).  But very little similar work has gotten done in Congress largely because leadership will not even allow reform bills to come up for a full vote.  There are good reasons to think we could and would get many amendments to the federal penal code if up-or-down votes were allowed on various leading reform proposals --- e.g., the GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee voted 75% in support of a massive sentencing reform bill in October 2015.  In light of the reality that significant federal sentencing reform seems to gets significant majority support when it gets a vote, one cannot quite say that full enforcement of existing federal criminal laws is fully compliant with the will of the people.

"Why Did a Federal Judge Sentence a Terminally Ill Mother to 75 Years for Health Care Fraud?"

The question in the title of this post is the headline of this recent law.com article about a notable (and notably harsh) federal sentencing.  Here are some of the details, with some commentary to follow:

A federal judge in Texas sentenced a terminally ill woman to 75 years in prison last month for bilking Medicare — an apparent record sentence for the U.S. Department of Justice for health care fraud.

Marie Neba, 53, of Sugar Land, Texas, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon of the Southern District of Texas on eight counts stemming from her role in a $13 million Medicare fraud scheme.  Neba, the owner and director of nursing at a Houston home health agency, was convicted after a two-week jury trial last November.  At the sentencing on Aug. 11, the government recommended a 35-year imprisonment, said Michael Khouri, who started representing Neba as her private attorney shortly after the trial... 

The unusually lengthy sentence for what health care fraud legal experts call a relatively routine case has them scratching their heads, even in this recent era of the federal government’s crackdown on health care fraud.  Neba, the mother of 7-year-old twin sons, was diagnosed in May with stage IV metastatic breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and bones, according to Khouri, who has filed an appeal of the conviction and the sentence.  She currently is receiving chemotherapy treatments and is in custody in a federal detention center.  “Marie Neba is a mother, a wife and a human being who is dying. If there is any defendant that stands before the court that deserves a below-guideline sentence … it’s this woman that stands before you,” Khouri argued before Harmon at the sentencing hearing, according to a transcript recently obtained by ALM....

Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who heads the government interaction and white-collar practice group at Greensfelder, Hemker & Gale in Chicago, said given the circumstances, he would have expected Neba to receive a sentence of several years in prison.  “Nothing is surprising in that she went to jail and not for six months,” he said. “But how you get anything close to 75 years is beyond me and makes no sense at all.  In 35 years, I have never heard of the government’s [prison term] recommendation being doubled by the judge, particularly when the government is asking for a tough sentence anyway.”

Gejaa Gobena, a litigation partner at Hogan Lovells and former chief of the DOJ Criminal Division’s Health Care Fraud Unit, concurred. “We prosecuted hundreds of cases and never had a sentence approaching anywhere near this,” Gobena said.

Legally, the answer to how the long sentence came about is not that difficult: Harmon, applying several enhancements under the federal sentencing guidelines, imposed the statutory maximum prison term on each charge, and then ran them consecutively.  “I am not a heartless person. I think I am not. I hope I am not,” Harmon told Neba before announcing the sentence. “It must be a terrible experience that you are going through, Ms. Neba, and I don’t want you to think that by sentencing you to what I am going to sentence you to that I’m trying to heap more difficulties on you because I am not. … It’s just the way the system works, the way the law works. You have been found guilty of a number of counts by a jury, and this is what happens.”

Even so, historically, the case is highly unusual, breaking the previous record by 25 years.  Since a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in December 2007 that reaffirmed that the federal sentencing guidelines are merely advisory, federal trial judges have much greater latitude to impose what they think are appropriate sentences, even if the guidelines call for higher or lower sentences.  The longest health care fraud sentence prior to Neba’s came in 2011, when Lawrence Duran, the owner of a Miami-area mental health care company, was sentenced to 50 years for orchestrating a $205 million Medicare scheme that defrauded vulnerable patients with dementia and substance abuse. The next longest? Forty-five years in 2015 for a Detroit doctor who gave chemotherapy to healthy patients, whom federal prosecutors then called the “most egregious fraudster in the history of this country.”

According to court documents, Neba, from 2006 to 2015, conspired with others to defraud Medicare by submitting more than $10 million in false claims for home health services provided through Fiango Home Healthcare Inc., owned by Neba and her husband and co-defendant, Ebong Tilong. Using that money, Neba paid illegal kickbacks to patient recruiters for referrals and to Medicare beneficiaries who allowed Fiango to use their Medicare information to bill for home health services that were not medically necessary nor provided, and, all told, received $13 million in ill-gotten Medicare payments, the documents said.

Neba was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud, three counts of health care fraud, one count of conspiracy to pay and receive health care kickbacks, one count of payment and receipt of health care kickbacks, one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of making health care false statements.

Four co-defendants, including Tilong, have pleaded guilty in the case. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 13....

Harmon, through her case manager, declined to comment on the case. The transcript, however, reveals several factors that influenced her decision to impose the lengthy prison term, including: “Most importantly,” Neba’s sentencing guideline range of life imprisonment (though Harmon was proscribed by statutory maximums from imposing a life sentence);..... Neba’s attempt to obstruct justice by telling a co-defendant, before arraignment in the federal courthouse, “to keep to her story,” specifically “not to tell anybody that she, [the co-defendant], was paying the patients.”

Neba’s decision to go to trial on the charges, rather than plead guilty and provide some sort of government assistance, also played a role in her sentence. Had she pleaded guilty to one or more of the charges “at the very beginning without obstruction of justice,” and received the highest credit for cooperation for doing so, Neba’s sentencing guideline range would have been 14.5 years, federal prosecutor William Chang told Harmon during the hearing. “Had the same thing happened and she received no [credit] whatsoever, it would be 21.8 years,” he added. “If she had gone to trial and been convicted, but no obstruction of justice, the sentence would have been 30 years on the calculation of the guidelines. So, we want the court to understand the United States’ principal position for what it seeks.”

Khouri, Neba’s attorney, said he plans to challenge on appeal the manner in which the sentencing guideline range was calculated and argue, among other matters, that the sentence is excessive.

I have quoted so much of this press report because the more details it provides, the more perverse the entire federal sentencing system seems along with the perversity of this particularly extreme sentence. For starters, though we supposedly have a federal sentencing system designed to sentence a defendant based principally on the seriousness of her offense, this defendant's guideline range ballooned from less than 15 years imprisonment to life imprisonment essentially because she put the government to its burden of proof at a trial and said the wrong thing to a co-defendant.

Trial penalty guideline calculations notwithstanding, now that the guidelines are advisory, a prosecutor and a judge would need to be able to justify such an extreme functional LWOP sentence based on all the 3553(a) statutory factors. No matter how seriously one regards health care fraud, I cannot fully understand how any of these factors (save the guideline range) can support this extreme sentence in this not-so-extreme case of fraud.  If reasonableness review has any substance whatsoever, and if the facts in this article are accurate, it seems to me that this sentence ought to be found substantive unreasonable.

Might Justice Gorsuch juice up the SCOTUS sentencing docket ... perhaps starting with IAC case from Arkansas?

The SCOTUS sentencing docket has felt relatively muted to me in recent years, due in part to transition issues after Justice Scalia's unexpected death and due in part to Apprendi and Booker jurisprudence no longer garnering much of the Court's attention.  Of course, the application of Eighth Amendment doctrines after Miller and Graham and vagueness doctrines after Johnson can and will continue to provide grist for the SCOTUS sentencing mill, and it also still seems no SCOTUS Term would be complete without a few capital cases on the docket.  Nevertheless, with SCOTUS soon to have its “long conference” in which the Justices will consider all the cert petitions that stacked up over the summer, I find myself not really expecting exciting cert grants on many (or perhaps any) issues that will rev up sentencing fans.

That said, and as the title of this post suggests, perhaps new personnel at SCOTUS could mean some new juice for the SCOTUS sentencing docket.  As noted in this post from May, Justice Gorsuch has opted out of the cert pool, and I suspect that could lead him to be more engaged with criminal cases that may get short shrift through the cert pool screening process. In addition, as detailed in this prior post, Justice Gorsuch had a remarkable little concurrence in a federal mandatory-minimum sentencing case, Hicks v. US, No. 16-7806 (S. Ct. June 26, 2017) (available here), right before all the Justices left for summer vacation.  Though these tea leaves hardly ensure that the new guy is a vote for cert in all the sentencing cases I find interesting, it remains fun to speculate whether Justice Gorsuch's libertarian-leaning instincts might make him more inclined to vote to review petitions of criminal defendants than some of his colleagues.

If Justice Gorsuch is looking for cert worthy sentencing cases, Carissa Byrne Hessick tees one up in this new post over at PrawfsBlawg, titled "Thompson v. Arkansas and Ineffective Assistance of Counsel at Sentencing."  Here is how that posting gets started:

Earlier this summer, I helped write a cert petition for the US Supreme Court.  The case involves an ineffective assistance claim out of Arkansas.  The petitioner, Mario Thompson, was represented at trial by a lawyer who didn’t do very much on his behalf.  Among other things, the lawyer failed to investigate or prepare any sort of meaningful mitigation case for sentencing.  On collateral attack, a state judge held that the lawyer failed to provide effective assistance of counsel at sentencing. But the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed.

Arkansas has a rule that a defendant who is claiming a violation of her Sixth Amendment right to counsel cannot show prejudice if she did not receive the maximum available sentence.  This rule is inconsistent with the reasoning of Glover v. United States, 531 U.S. 198 (2001).  And although Arkansas is the only jurisdiction to have adopted this particular rule, there is a split over the appropriate prejudice standard for ineffective assistance of counsel at sentencing claims.  The Second, Third, Sixth, and Tenth Circuits have adopted what I think is the correct legal standard.  The courts of last resort in Louisiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin have adopted that same standard.  But Arkansas and the Fifth Circuit have adopted different prejudice standards.  And several federal district courts have started to question how they ought to assess these claims.

Noting judicial resistance (and legal questions) as Ohio law pushes judges to avoid state prison sentences for certain offenders

This fascinating article in the Columbus Dispatch, headlined "Some Ohio counties leery of Kasich program to divert low-level offenders from prison," highlights a novel and controversial new  sentencing law in Ohio that some local judges and official plainly dislike. Here are excerpts:

The 43-year-old career criminal broke into three Obetz businesses — a market and two pizza parlors — by smashing windows or door glass with rocks and concrete blocks over a four-day period last summer.  A Franklin County Common Pleas judge sent him to prison for two years, a decision that was upheld last week by the county court of appeals.  But under a program in which Franklin County will be required to participate beginning next July, the state will penalize the county for sending such an offender to prison.

The Targeted Community Alternatives to Prison program, approved by legislators in June as part of the state budget, seeks to reduce the prison population by diverting nonviolent, low-level felons to probation, local jails or community-based programs.  In return, the counties will receive grants from the state Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to offset the cost of supervising, treating or jailing those offenders in their communities.

The program, advocated by prisons Director Gary Mohr and Gov. John Kasich, has received opposition from judges and prosecutors across the state since it was proposed.  Most judges don’t like it because “it infringes on our discretion by telling us there are certain felons we can’t send to prison,” said Judge Stephen L. McIntosh, the administrative judge for Franklin County Common Pleas Court.

Some counties have decided that the grant money being offered by the state won’t be enough to cover the costs of keeping offenders in the community who otherwise would have gone to prison.  Others have offered a harsh assessment of a program that gives grants to judges in exchange for keeping certain offenders out of prison.  “Essentially what judges are being offered is a bribe,” Stark County Common Pleas Judge Kristin Farmer said in August when she and her colleagues on the bench encouraged their county commissioners not to participate in the program this year....

Franklin and Stark are among the state’s 10 largest counties, all of which are mandated under the law to participate in the program beginning July 1, 2018.  Franklin County’s Common Pleas judges will meet Tuesday to decide whether to participate in the program before the mandate kicks in, McIntosh said.  Last week, Cuyahoga County joined Stark in deciding not to implement the program until next summer. “The state’s offer of resources is completely inadequate to the demands that it will put on our local jails and our systems,” Armond Budish, the Cuyahoga County executive, said in a news release....

Under the program, offenders convicted of fifth-degree felonies, the lowest felony level, are not to be sentenced to prison unless they’ve committed a violent offense, a sex crime or a drug-trafficking offense.  The state correction department estimated that 4,000 such offenders were sent to prison last year.  If a participating county sends someone to prison in violation of the criteria, their grant money will be docked $72 a day for each day the offender is held in a state facility.

Clinton County Common Pleas Judge John W. “Tim” Rudduck has been participating since October in a pilot program to test the concept and is a vocal supporter of its benefits. “I’m looking at it from the perspective of a single judge in a semi-rural county with limited resources,” he said.  “The money we have received has been instrumental in developing resources (to support alternatives to prison) that we never had before.”  Before the program was implemented, some offenders were going to prison simply because Clinton County didn’t have the resources to treat or supervise them in the community, he said.

The program is voluntary for 78 counties. So far, 48 counties have agreed to implement the program....  A system in which some Ohio counties follow the program and other don’t is “patently unconstitutional,” said Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien.  The Ohio Constitution, he said, requires “uniform operation” of all laws.  That concept is violated when a defendant receives a prison sentence in one county for an offense for which he would be prohibited from receiving prison in another.

Those “equal protection” concerns are almost certain to lead to legal challenges for the program, said Paul Pfeifer, executive director of the Ohio Judicial Conference.  “I’d fully expect a test case to be filed on that issue,” said Pfeifer, a former state Supreme Court justice and state senator.  His organization, which represents all judges in Ohio, has expressed concerns about the program, but wants to work with judges to make its implementation as smooth as possible now that it’s the law, he said.

"Criminalizing Race: Racial Disparities in Plea Bargaining"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper authored by Carlos Berdejó available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Most of the empirical research examining racial disparities in the criminal justice system has focused on its two endpoints — the arrest and initial charging of defendants and judges’ sentencing decisions.  Few studies have assessed disparities in the steps leading up to a defendant’s conviction, where various actors make choices that often constraint judges’ ultimate sentencing discretion.  This article addresses this gap by examining racial disparities in the plea-bargaining process, focusing on the period between the initial filing of charges and the defendant’s conviction.

The results presented in this article reveal significant racial disparities in this stage of the criminal justice system. White defendants are twenty-five percent more likely than black defendants to have their principal initial charge dropped or reduced to a lesser crime.  As a result, white defendants who face initial felony charges are less likely than black defendants to be convicted of a felony.  Similarly, white defendants initially charged with misdemeanors are more likely than black defendants to be convicted for crimes carrying no possible incarceration or not being convicted at all.

Racial disparities in plea-bargaining outcomes are greater in cases involving misdemeanors and low-level felonies. In cases involving severe felonies, black and white defendants achieve similar outcomes.  Defendants’ criminal histories also play a key role in mediating racial disparities.  While white defendants with no prior convictions receive charge reductions more often than black defendants with no prior convictions, white and black defendants with prior convictions are afforded similar treatment by prosecutors.  These patterns in racial disparities suggest that prosecutors may be using race as a proxy for a defendant’s latent criminality and likelihood to recidivate.

"Parental Arrest, Incarceration and the Outcomes of Their Children"

The title of this post is the title of this paper recently posted to SSRN authored by Stephen Billings. Here is the abstract:

Parental arrest and incarceration represents a profound and traumatic experience for almost 3 million children in the U.S. and scholars in sociology and criminology consistently find negative impacts of parental incarceration on children across a range of academic and behavioral outcomes.  Unfortunately, the challenge of disentangling parental incarceration from other parenting attributes has limited causal inference in this literature.

The research presented here provides compelling evidence that parental arrest coincides with negative outcomes for children, but that the incarceration of a parent may have short term benefits for the child.  Results suggest that incarceration removes negative role models and leads to changes in a child's home environment.