Another round of criticisms of Prez Trump's decision to nominate Bill Otis to US Sentencing Commission

As reported in this prior post, Prez Trump back in early March announced these notable new nominations to the US Sentencing Commission.  As I have noted before, it is usually only hard-core sentencing nerds like me who pay much attention to USSC nominations.  But this slate of nominees, especially the nomination of Bill Otis, has led to more than the usual amount of focus on how Prez Trump is looking to put his stamp on the USSC.  I noted in this post back in March an array of critical commentary from media outlets like Mother Jones, Reason and Slate, and recently these two new commentaries have furthered this notable nominee chatter:

• From the Cato Institute here, "A Troubling Nomination to the U.S. Sentencing Commission"
• From the New Republic here, "The Man Who Hates Criminal-Justice Reform: Bill Otis believes America must maintain draconian policies to be tough on crime. No wonder Trump picked him for a key administration post."

Here are some excerpts from the New Republic piece, with some notable quotes for and against the nominee:

The commission isn’t typically prone to partisan warfare. In fact, Congress created the seven-member body in 1984 precisely so it could avoid politicized battles when crafting federal sentencing guidelines. Otis’s nomination could upset that balance.

“He’s been the arch-nemesis of criminal-justice reform at the federal level for a decade at least,” Kevin Ring, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), told me. “He’s opposed basically every legislative reform, every reform the Sentencing Commission has passed, and just seems to enjoy that curmudgeonly position of saying no.”

FAMM, which advocates for sentencing reform through Congress and before the Sentencing Commission, has never endorsed or opposed a commission nominee before, preferring instead to work with those commissioners once they’re in office. But Otis’s nomination changed that. “He’s an ideologue in a position that is supposed to be driven by evidence and data,” Ring said....

If confirmed by the Senate, Otis would bring first-hand experience with the federal criminal-justice system under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Among the posts he held during three decades in the government are stints as a legal advisor to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s administrator, as a special counsel in the George W. Bush White House, and as a federal prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia, where he led the office’s appellate division.

Otis’s nomination has raised alarm among pro-reform groups that see the commission as a key ally in reining in mass incarceration in America, and it’s at odds with the reformist zeitgeist that’s swept D.C. think tanks and advocacy groups on the left, right, and center. Organizations ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Koch brothers’ political network have put muscle behind the effort to reduce over-incarceration in recent years. Lower crime rates also helped spur state and federal lawmakers to rethink harsh policies from a bygone era.

Not everyone is on board with the shift away from tough-on-crime politics, including Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But few are more vocal about it than Otis. “Although I am decidedly out-of-step with my learned colleagues inside the Beltway, and despite all the puff pieces in the press running in the other direction, I don’t feel lonely in opposing the more-crime-faster proposals marketing themselves as ‘sentencing reform,’” he wrote in 2014.

Otis declined to comment for this article, citing standard practices for pending judicial-branch nominees. Those who’ve worked with him say his appointment would bring a much-needed alternative perspective to the Sentencing Commission’s work. Kent Scheidegger, a California-based attorney and legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, told me that he thinks it’s important to avoid a “uniformity of viewpoint” on the commission.

“[Otis] has a view that the rush to lessen sentences, particularly for serious crimes, is a mistake, that it’s going too far too fast, and that people who have the contrary view necessarily are opposed to that,” he said. Scheidegger shares that skepticism of reformers’ efforts, telling me, “I think they’re largely forgetting history and condemning us to repeat it.”

The two men are regular contributors to Crime and Consequences, a blog that discusses criminal-justice issues from a conservative perspective. Otis’s posts there offer brief but illuminating glimpses into how he approaches the subject. His central theme is straightforward and often bluntly expressed: that tough-on-crime policies helped bring down crime over the past 25 years, and scaling them back will cause crime to surge upwards once more....

Otis occasionally takes aim at perceived elites whom he casts as insulated from the consequences of their policy decisions. “When early release goes wrong, as it so often does, who pays the price?” he wrote in 2016. “The sentencing reform crowd at their posh, self-congratulatory, ‘we-are-so-humane’ parties in Manhattan and Hollywood, or the next unsuspecting victim they helped set up?”

But Otis’s views are also out of sync with a growing number of conservatives. Republican leaders in red states like Georgia and Texas have adopted measures aimed at reducing recidivism and lowering excessive prison populations. “Someone who doesn’t adapt to new ways of thinking that have actually proven to be a lot more effective than simply warehousing people for years on end — someone who can’t accept that reality — doesn’t really need to be on the Sentencing Commission,” Jason Pye, the vice president for legislative affairs at FreedomWorks, told me.

Scheidegger said the debate over Otis’s positions would be a net positive for the commission. “I think it’s a good nomination, and I think it’s important to keep it in the context of the whole panel, including representation on the other side of the aisle as well,” he told me. “That’s an important aspect of the nomination. Diversity of viewpoint on this subject is a good thing.”

Trump’s nominees to the commission are still awaiting Senate confirmation.  The other three are William Pryor, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals judge, as well as Third Circuit judge Luis Restrepo and federal district-court judge Henry Hudson.  Reform advocates told me they also had concerns about Hudson, who once went by the sobriquet “Hang ’em High Harry” as a prosecutor in the 1980s, but acknowledged he has plenty of practical experience as a sentencing jurist.

But Otis is still a bridge too far, they told me, even though many of them said they like him personally. “Part of the commission’s job is to take some of the politics away from the politicians,” Ring said. “You want sentencing to be driven by this commission as some insulation from Congress. And that’s the worst place for an ideologue from either side.”

Prior related posts:

• Prez Trump makes (tough) nominations to US Sentencing Commission 
• Lots of notable reaction to Prez Trump's nominations to the US Sentencing Commission