"Iowa judge calls sentencing guidelines for meth dealers 'flawed'"

The title of this post is the headline of this local article discussing a significant federal sentencing decision handed down late Friday.  Here are the basics:

Sioux City-based U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett on Friday became one of a handful of U.S. judges to declare public opposition to federal sentencing guidelines for methamphetamine dealers. He wrote that he considers them to be “fundamentally flawed,” not based on empirical data and too harsh for lower-level drug figures.

Bennett — declaring in a 44-page ruling that he has a “fundamental policy disagreement” with the methamphetamine portion of guidelines that federal judges are supposed to consider in sentencing criminals — cut the sentence of Sioux City drug dealer Willie Hayes to six years and three months from a possible 15 years, eight months....

Bennett, a longtime critic of mandatory minimum sentences, notes in his opinion that the methamphetamine guidelines lack the depth of other portions of the sentencing blueprint and appear to be more influenced by politics than by science. Methamphetamine dealers in recent years have faced much harsher sentences than dealers of marijuana, cocaine or heroin and run into mandatory minimum sentences for handling a much lower quantity of drug.

“The methamphetamine guidelines are fundamentally flawed because they fail to consider additional factors beyond quantity,” Bennett wrote. “The system is too severe in the indiscriminate way it treats offenders … . Since the methamphetamine guidelines are fundamentally flawed, I find that they fail to promote the purposes of sentencing” outlined in federal law.

Des Moines defense attorney Angela Campbell called the ruling “a very big deal, and it’s also something that’s been coming for a while.”...

Bennett’s ruling borrows reasoning from two other federal judges who have made similar stands — Joseph Bataillon of Nebraska and John Gleeson of New York. “He’s not a lone voice in the wilderness,” said Iowa defense attorney F. Montgomery Brown. And Bennett’s ruling likely will have an affect on how federal drug cases are argued.

“It’s an argument that defense lawyers in both the Northern and Southern districts of Iowa need to make,” Brown said. “It’s malpractice not to.”

I concur with the sentiment that Judge Bennett's work in US v. Hayes (available here) is a "very big deal," and I believe that federal defense attorneys nationwide, not just in Iowa, ought to be raising arguments based on Hayes in every federal meth sentencing case.