Praise for recent Nesbeth opinion using collateral consequences to justify probation sentence for federal drug offense

Lincoln Caplan has authored this New Yorker piece, headlined "Why a Brooklyn Judge Refused to Send a Drug Courier to Prison," to praise US District Judge Block's discussion of the impact and import of collateral consequences in his Nesbeth sentencing opinion (first discussed here). Here are excerpts:

Block explained that he had imposed a year of probation, with two special conditions: six months of home confinement (“to drive home the point that even though I have not put her in prison, I consider her crimes to be serious”) and a hundred hours of community service (“in the hope that the Probation Department will find a vehicle for Ms. Nesbeth, as an object lesson, to counsel young people as to how their lives can be destroyed if they succumb to the temptation to commit a crime, regardless of their circumstances”). 

But the bulk of his opinion — the reason federal judges throughout the country have been sending it to one another as a cutting-edge view on an important issue in sentencing—is about why he “rendered a non-incarceratory sentence.”  He wrote that it was largely “because of a number of statutory and regulatory collateral consequences she will face as a convicted felon” — restrictions that the federal government, as well as every state government, imposes on anyone convicted of a crime, but especially a felony. A broad range of the restrictions, he said, “serve no useful function other than to further punish criminal defendants after they have completed their court-imposed sentences.”

Block asked the U.S. Attorney’s office and the Federal Defenders of New York, which represented Nesbeth, to provide him with a list of the collateral consequences that she faces as a convicted felon.  The government identified what it described as the “handful” that are “potentially relevant.”  The loss of a driver’s license is the least onerous. She is also ineligible for student grants, loans, or work assistance for two years, and banned for life from receiving food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, though Connecticut could grant her an exemption.  She and her family can be denied federally assisted housing for a “reasonable time,” and she cannot be issued a passport until her probation is finished, which matters to Nesbeth because, as her lawyer told the judge, her “father, grandmother, and extended family all reside abroad.”

The judge recounted that federal law imposes considerably more than a handful of consequences, “nearly 1,200 collateral consequences for convictions generally, and nearly 300 for controlled-substances offenses.”  Nesbeth’s counsel, Amanda David, of the Federal Defenders, said federal laws will make it difficult for her client to become an educator because they provide money “for background checks of all employees of educational agencies,” and a conviction for a drug felony “can be used as grounds for denying employment for potential employees who want to be involved in providing care to children under age 18.”  David also reported that Connecticut automatically bars anyone from getting a teaching certificate for five years after being convicted of a drug felony....

The main conclusion of the judge’s opinion is that, while the law allowed him to take account of the civil penalties when he sentenced her, there was nothing he could do to protect her from them. He joined criminal-justice experts in encouraging Congress and state legislatures “to determine whether the plethora of post-sentence punishments imposed upon felons is truly warranted,” and suggested that they do the country “more harm than good.” He didn’t say so, but for many legislatures that would mean carefully assessing these punishments for the first time.  As the criminal-justice scholar Jeremy Travis wrote, in 2002, legislatures have often adopted collateral consequences in unaccountable ways: “as riders to other, major pieces of legislation,” which are “given scant attention.”  They are, Travis said, “invisible ingredients in the legislative menu of criminal sanctions.”

The judge made clear why the severity of collateral consequences—authorizing discrimination in education, employment, housing, and many other basic elements of American life—means that anyone convicted of a felony is likely to face an arduous future. This predicament has been called modern civil death, social exclusion, and internal exile. Whatever it is called, its vast array of penalties kicks in automatically with a conviction, defying the supposedly bedrock principle of American law that the punishment must fit the crime.

Prior related post:

• Federal judge justifies below-guideline sentence of probation for drug importer because of "statutory and regulatory collateral consequences she will face as a convicted felon"