More on the Tennessee waltz toward a Blakely fix

In this post, I noted a newspaper account of recommendations approved this past Friday by the Tennessee state task force created to assess and repond to Blakely (background here and here).  Over the weekend, attorney David Raybin, whom the press has dubbed "the chief architect of the proposal approved Friday," sent me additional materials concerning the work of the Tennessee Blakely task force.  As David explained in an e-mail, a "formal report will be forthcoming, but the attached preliminary review addresses the various drafts and the compromise that was acceptable to the various sides."

Though the attached document starts with the newspaper article posted earlier, David was quick to note the article did not fully capture the compromise which had produced a final recommendation for, in David's word, an "advisory system that begins sentencing determinations with a statutory base not unlike the post-Booker federal system but without the math."  The attached document also includes an article by Vanderbilt University Professor Nancy King, and David stressed that "Professor King and Professor Don Hall (also of  Vanderbilt) and Professor Neil Cohen of the University of Tennessee worked very hard to keep us on track and come up with a proposal that should pass constitutional muster."

Download raybins_account_of_tennessee_blakely_solution.pdf