Judge Kaplan addresses fast-track disparity

As detailed in this post last month, the fascinating post-Booker debate over fast-track programs and sentencing disparities, which has already triggered fascinating opinions from Judge Adelman and Judge Cassell and Judge Presnell and others, became the subject of a fascinating set of briefs before SDNY Judge Lewis Kaplan in US v. Krukowski.  The Government in its filing raised a number of interesting arguments in an effort to dissuade Judge Kaplan from mitigating a sentence based on fast-track realities.

As detailed the transcript of the sentencing I just received (and make available for download below), Judge Kaplan found each of the Government's arguments against a mitigated sentence based on fast-track realities "quite unpersuasive."  But Judge Kaplan ultimately imposed a sentence at the bottom of the Guidelines range, in part because in many other fast-track districts, the defendant would have been in an overlapping range.  As the helpful reader who sent me this transcript put matters, while the fast-track debate "gave Mr. Krukowski no benefit, it should be good fodder for future cases, perhaps ones where the Guidelines range is higher (and the resulting disparity greater)."

Download kaplan_fasttrack_krukowski_opinion.pdf