Contextualizing Judge Jackson's mainstream sentencing record in federal child porn cases

A tweet stream by Senator Josh Hawley about writings, comments and sentencings by SCOTUS nominee Judge Jackson has kicked off a robust discussion of her attitudes toward sex offenders and those who download child pornography (CP). Senator Hawley's tweets referenced Judge Jackson's law school Note in the Harvard Law Review and questions she asked while on the US Sentencing Commission.  What the Senator references in these tweets struck me as not especially sensational nor ultimately a strong basis for questioning her judicial temperament or philosophy.  But he thereafter discussed Judge Jackson's below-guideline sentencing decisions in CP cases when she served as a federal district judge, and I certainly consider reviews of sentencing decisions to be a fair and sound component of assessing Judge Jackson's record as a jurist.

But, to be truly fair and sound, any review of Judge Jackson's CP sentencings must include proper context regarding the federal sentencing guidelines for CP which are widely recognized as dysfunctional and unduly severe.  As this recent US Sentencing Commission report explains, the CP guideline (2G2.2) "fails to distinguish adequately between more and less severe offenders" (p. 19), and "most courts believe §2G2.2 is generally too severe and does not appropriately measure offender culpability in the typical non-production child pornography case" (p. 22).  With the CP guidelines "too severe" and poorly designed to "measure offender culpability" in the digital age, federal judges nationwide rarely follow them.  Indeed, data in recent (and past) USSC reports document that Judge Jackson's record of imposing below-guideline CP sentences is quite mainstream because: (1) federal judges nationwide typically sentence below the CP guideline in roughly 2 out of 3 cases (p. 23), and (2) federal judges nationwide, when deciding to go below the CP guideline, typically impose sentences around 54 months below the calculated guideline minimum (p. 25).

Reviewing a brief accounting of nine CP cases sentenced by Judge Jackson (which I believe was produced by GOP Senators and/or staff and was forwarded to me), I was first struck by the fact that in a majority of these cases (5 of 9) the prosecution advocated for a below-guideline sentence and in three others the prosecution advocated for only the guideline minimum.  In other words, Judge Jackson was generally sentencing CP defendants in cases in which even the prosecution concluded mitigating factors meant that the guidelines were not a proper benchmark range in light of congressional sentencing purposes.  Notably, the recent USSC report indicates that the government formally moves for a below-range sentence in roughly 1 out of every 5 CP cases (p. 23); it is not clear if prosecutors made formal motions for departures or variances in Judge Jackson's CP cases, but it is clear that in the majority of these cases the prosecutors were the ones who requested a sentence below the CP guidelines.

In the nine cases, Judge Jackson followed the prosecutors' sentencing recommendations in two cases, and sentenced below the prison term suggested by the government in seven others.  One case, US v. Hillie, distorts the average deviation from the prosecutors' recommendations, as the government there sought a sentence of 45 years and Judge Jackson imposed a sentence of "only" 29.5 years. Leaving that case out of the average, in the other eight cases, Judge Jackson's sentence was only about 1.8 years below the recommendation of prosecutors (and about .6 years above the defense recommendations).  In those cases, Judge Jackson did sentence, on average, about 54 months below the calculated guideline minimum, but that degree of reduction from the guideline minimum is almost identical to the national average reduction according to the USSC report (p. 25).

In other words, Judge Jackson's record in these CP cases does show she is quite skeptical of the ranges set by the CP guidelines, but so too were prosecutors in the majority of her cases and so too are district judges nationwide (appointed by presidents of both parties).  I use the word "mainstream" to describe Judge Jackson's sentencing patterns here because they strike me as not at all out of the ordinary; there are surely federal judges who have sentenced CP offenders more harshly, but there are also surely federal judges who have sentenced CP offenders more leniently.  Judge Jackson's sentencing record in CP cases reflects the fundamental flaws of the CP guidelines (and perhaps a relatively mitigated group of offenders she was tasked with sentencing).  As I see it, these cases do not really reveal any kind of unique or uniquely concerning sentencing jurisprudence.

There is more to say on this topic — e.g., I suspect that Judge Jackson's views in these cases were usefully informed by (1) the unanimous bipartisan USSC report authored in 2012 which stressed "the current sentencing scheme results in overly severe guideline ranges for some offenders based on outdated and disproportionate enhancements" and (2) the Justice Department's 2013 follow-up letter that "joined in the call for a critical review of the existing sentencing guidelines for non-production child pornography crimes" — and I suspect we will hear a lot more on this topic in the days ahead.  For now, I will conclude where the title of this post starts: if and when we properly contextualize Judge Jackson's sentencing record in federal child porn cases, it looks pretty mainstream.