Notable new Roll Call review of congressional views of US Sentencing Commission's debate over sentence reductions

Roll Call has this notable new piece discussing the debate over the new federal sentencing guidelines for sentence reduction motions.  The article mostly discusses the politics surrounding reform rather than all the particulars of the legal reforms, and I am not sure it breaks any new ground.  But it is still a useful read for those keeping up on these matters, even though the text and even the headline of the piece is a bit off legally.  Here are excerpts:

A federal agency has given judges a new tool to reduce unusually long sentences for some prisoners if there is a change in a law, an approach Republican senators warned will hamper, if not destroy, the possibility of future criminal justice legislation.

The policy approved this month by the low-profile U.S. Sentencing Commission is deep in the legal weeds, giving guidance for federal judges on how to interpret a section of a sweeping bipartisan overhaul of the federal criminal justice system passed in 2018.  But the debate on that approach, which goes into effect in November unless Congress disapproves it, offers an inside look at the negotiations and challenges for lawmakers who want to take more steps to address racial inequality in the criminal justice system through sentencing changes...

In the 2018 criminal justice law, Congress allowed federal inmates to directly ask courts to release them from prison for extraordinary and compelling reasons. Judges released thousands of inmates through that mechanism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the sentencing guidance the commission adopted this month, a change in a law could be potential grounds for reducing a defendant’s sentence. Specifically, judges could consider reducing the sentence of an inmate who has served 10 years of an “unusually long sentence” if there is a “gross disparity” between their sentence and sentences imposed under new law.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, who was the lead Republican on the push for the 2018 law, warned the commission that the guidance would cause problems for future bills that would reduce prison sentences. McConnell in a February letter to the commission said that no issue was more controversial during the debate on the 2018 law than whether it would be applied retroactively to those already in prison. Congress is extremely careful with use of retroactivity — if lawmakers want something to be retroactive, they typically say so clearly in the law — and so guidance that approves of judges doing so would “poison the well” in Congress, he said....

The guidelines went through changes following the comments from Senate Republicans and Democrats, but the thrust of the provision remained the same and the commission voted for guidelines that approve of judges retroactively considering certain sentences.

I am inclined to dicker with the very first clause of the article — "A federal agency has given judges a new tool to reduce unusually long sentences for some prisoners if there is a change in a law" — because it was Congress who created the tool to reduce sentences under the (so-called compassionate release) statutory provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A) and Congress did so way back in 1984.  In addition, as this article notes, the FIRST STEP Act of 2018 (another act of Congress) allowed this tool to function more effectively by allowing prisoners to make motions directly in court for sentence reduction without awaiting a filing by the Bureau of Prisons. 

Moreover, since passage of the FIRST STEP Act, many circuits have ruled that a change in law could be potential grounds for reducing a defendant’s sentence in any and every case, whereas the new guidelines promulated by the US Sentencing Commission significantly restricts the circumstances under which a change of law can be the basis for a sentencing reduction.  Thus, I think a more accurate openning line might have been something like: "A federal agency has narrowed the reach of a long-standing tool that Congress provided to judges as a means to reduce sentences which had become far more widely used after passage of the bipartisan FIRST STEP Act."