"How the Economic Loss Guideline Lost its Way, and How to Save It"

I have been overdue in blogging about this recent article which shares the title of this post and was published earlier this year in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law.  This piece was authored by Barry Boss and Kara Kapp, and it is still very timely as we think about priority concerns for a new US Sentencing Commission (whenever it gets members).  In addition, the enduring issues discussed in this article could soon become a focal point of a very high-profile sentencing if a jury brings back fraud convictions against Elizabeth Holmes.  Here is this article's introduction:

This Article revisits a stubborn problem that has been explored by commentators repeatedly over the past thirty years, but which remains unresolved to this day.  The economic crimes Guideline, Section 2B1.1 of the United States Sentencing Manual, routinely recommends arbitrary, disproportionate, and often draconian sentences to first-time offenders of economic crimes.  These disproportionate sentences are driven primarily by Section 2B1.1’s current loss table, which has an outsized role in determining the length of an economic crime offender’s sentence.  Moreover, this deep flaw in the Guideline’s design has led many judges to lose confidence entirely in the Guideline’s recommended sentences, leading to a wide disparity of sentences issued to similarly situated economic crime offenders across the country.  Accordingly, this Guideline has failed to address the primary problem it was designed to solve — unwarranted disparities among similarly situated offenders.  Worse still, it not only has failed to prevent such unwarranted disparities, its underlying design actively exacerbates them.  In the wake of the United States Sentencing Commission’s recent launch of its Interactive Data Analyzer in June 2020, the authors have identified new evidence that this pernicious problem continues to persist.

In Part I, we review the history and purposes of the Sentencing Guidelines, generally, and the economic crimes Guideline specifically.  In Part II, we explain how the current version of the economic crimes Guideline operates in practice, the extraordinarily high sentences it recommends in high-loss cases, and the resulting overemphasis on loss that overstates offenders’ culpability.  In Part III, we analyze data made available through the Commission’s Interactive Data Analyzer and discuss our findings.  In Part IV, we offer a series of reforms designed to restore the judiciary’s and practitioners’ respect for this Guideline so that it may serve its animating purpose — to reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities among similarly situated offenders