Sentencing Law and Policy

Cruising around some early commentary on Cruz v. Arizona

Perhaps in part because the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet issued that many notable opinions, and perhaps in part because every capital case that leads to an interesting 5-4 split ruling garners attention, there has been a good bit of early commentary regarding this past week's decision in Cruz v. Arizona, No. 21–846 (S. Ct. Feb 22, 2023) (available here), on behalf of a death row defendant. Here is a sampling:

At Crime & Consequences from Kent Scheidegger, "Supreme Court Reinstates Review of Arizona Murderer’s Case"

At Esquire from Charles P. Pierce, "Terrible Ideas Keep Inching Closer to Reality, Thanks to Supreme Court Conservatives"

At The Hill from Austin Sarat, "Supreme Court delivers rare victory for death row inmate: the chance to spend rest of his life behind bars"

At SCOTUSblog from Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, "In rare win for people on death row, justices chide Arizona for ignoring Supreme Court precedent"

At Slate from Leah Litman, "The Supreme Court Did Something Rare: Enforced a Precedent Conservatives Hate"

At the Washington Post from Ruth Markus, "The justices halt an execution — and reveal themselves in the process"

Split over reading of the FIRST-STEP-amended safety valve provision appears ready for SCOTUS review

In this post a couple of days ago, which discussed the latest notable circuit opinion interpreting the language Congress used in the FIRST STEP Act to expand the statutory safety valve enabling more federal drug defendants to be sentenced below mandatory minimum terms, I suggested it was only a matter of time before SCOTUS takes up the statutory interpretation dispute that has deeply divided lower courts.  And this new Relist Watch post by John Elwood at SCOTUSblog suggest it may actually be only a matter of days before cert is granted on this issue:

The Supreme Court will meet this Friday to consider whether to grant review in a group of around 95 petitions and motions. They will be considering eight cases for the second time....

Under the “safety-valve” provision of federal sentencing law, a defendant convicted of certain nonviolent drug crimes can obtain relief from statutory mandatory minimum sentences if, among other things, her criminal history satisfies criteria in 18 U.S.C § 3553(f)(1): she “does not have — (A) more than 4 criminal history points, excluding any criminal history points resulting from a 1-point offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines; (B) a prior 3-point offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines; and (C) a prior 2-point violent offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines.”

Pulsifer v. United States and Palomares v. United States present the question of how that provision should be read: whether a defendant is ineligible for relief from the mandatory minimum if her criminal history runs afoul of any one of the disqualifying criteria in subsections (A), (B), or (C), or is ineligible only if her criminal history runs afoul of all three disqualifying criteria, subsections (A), (B), and (C).  The government agrees that the circuits are divided and review is warranted, and recommends that the court take Pulsifer, which it says is the better vehicle.  Counsel for Palomares and Pulsifer trade barbs in their reply briefs about which is the better vehicle.  Probably at least one will get the grant.

I share the view that, if the Justice Department is advocating for review, we ought to expect a grant on one of these cases perhaps as early as Monday.  My understanding is that a grant now would set the case up for Fall 2023 argument and likely no decision from SCOTUS until early 2024. 

"The Federal Juvenile System"

The title of this post is the title of this paper authored by Esther Hong and recently posted to SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

With very few exceptions, the federal juvenile system has been ignored by legal scholars since its inception in 1938.  Yet, this understudied system has much to offer in this current age.  It offers a lens to better understand and address the pathologies of excessive prosecutorial power and punitiveness that plague our country’s other criminal and juvenile legal systems.  It also exemplifies and provides insights on limiting the carceral state.

This Article provides a detailed analysis of the federal juvenile system, situates its place in the overall American carceral landscape, and highlights its relevance to contemporary criminal and juvenile law movements.  With only fifty-five youths prosecuted nationwide in the federal juvenile system in 2021, this system stands apart for its relative absence of state carceral reach and its accompanying pathologies.  And by using the federal juvenile system as a foil for the federal criminal system — which grew the carceral state and amplified its harms — one can gain better insight into reducing the reach and attendant pathologies of the carceral state.

Florida completes its first execution since 2019

Florida has a large death row with more than 300 murderers awaiting execution, but the state has not executed anyone in the last few years.  But today the Sunshine State got its machinery of death up and running again as detailed in this AP article:

Florida executed a man on Thursday for murdering a woman in 1990 after he escaped from prison, stabbing her to death in a shopping mall parking lot in an attempted carjacking.

Donald Dillbeck, 59, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison, the governor’s office said. He had been convicted in the murder of Faye Vann, 44, in Tallahassee near the state Capitol.

The execution was Florida’s first in nearly four years and the third under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.  By comparison, his immediate predecessor, current U.S. Republican Sen. Rick Scott, oversaw 28 executions.

Vann’s children, Tony and Laura, released a statement after the execution: “11,932 days ago, Donald Dillbeck brutally killed our Mother. We were robbed of years of memories with her, and it has been very painful ever since.”  They thanked DeSantis for carrying out the execution, saying it “has given us some closure.”...

Dillbeck was 15 when he stabbed a man in Indiana while trying to steal a CB radio, court records show.  He fled to Florida, where Lee County Deputy Dwight Lynn Hall found him in a Fort Myers Beach parking lot.  While Hall was searching him, Dillbeck hit the deputy in the groin and ran. Hall tackled him and, as the two wrestled, Dillbeck took Hall’s gun and shot him twice.

Dillbeck was 11 years into a life sentence for killing the deputy when he walked away from a work release assignment catering a meal for a seniors event, according to court records.  He then bought a paring knife and walked to Tallahassee.  Vann was waiting for her family when Dillbeck approached her car with the knife and demanded a ride, saying he’d forgotten how to drive, court records show.  Vann honked the horn, tried to drive off and fought back that Sunday afternoon, but Dillbeck stabbed her more than 20 times and slit her throat, court records show. He crashed the car a short time later and was captured after running from the scene.

Despite a prior escape attempt and an assault on another prisoner, Dillbeck had been placed in a minimum security facility.  A furious Republican Gov. Bob Martinez fired three corrections officials and sought to implement rules to ensure prisoners with life sentences would be held in more secure settings.

Florida’s Supreme Court earlier this month denied appeals claiming he shouldn’t be put to death because he suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome and it was cruel and unusual to keep him on death row for more than 30 years before his death warrant was signed.  The U.S. Supreme Court denied his appeals Wednesday.

Second-round celebrity sex offenders sentencing day

I got two alerts from the New York Times this afternoon about celebrity sentencings, and both involve sex offenders getting sentenced for the second time. Here are the headlines and the basics:

"Harvey Weinstein Sentenced to 16 Years for Los Angeles Sex Crimes"

Harvey Weinstein, the movie producer whose treatment of women propelled the #MeToo movement in 2017, was sentenced on Thursday to 16 years in prison for committing sex crimes in Los Angeles County. The sentence in Los Angeles adds to the 23 years Mr. Weinstein is serving in New York after his conviction there in 2020.

"R. Kelly Sentenced to 20 Years for Child Sex Crimes"

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced R. Kelly to 20 years in prison for child sex crimes, after a jury found that he had produced three videos of himself sexually abusing his 14-year-old goddaughter.  In a victory for the defense, the judge ruled that all but one year of the prison sentence would be served at the same time as a previous 30-year sentence that Mr. Kelly received after a jury in Brooklyn convicted him of racketeering and sex trafficking charges.

CCJ report explores "The Relationship Between Sentence Length, Time Served, and State Prison Population Levels"

I keep noting this post from last year discussing the Council of Criminal Justice's impressive Task Force on Long Sentences, in part because that Task Force is continuing to produce all sorts of important research and analysis concerning long sentences (see prior posts linked below).  The latest report, which is available here, is authored by Gerald Gaes and Julia Laskorunsky and is titled "The Relationship Between Sentence Length, Time Served, and State Prison Population Levels."  Here is the part of the report's introduction and "key takeaways": 

Previous research for the Task Force shows that in recent years the share of the total U.S. prison population with sentences of 10 or more years has increased, driven by fewer people serving shorter terms.  In 2019, 57% of people in prison were serving a long sentence, up from 46% in 2005.  Over the same period, there was a 60% increase in the average amount of time served by people with long sentences.

This work builds on research conducted as part of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice’s Prison Release: Degrees of Indeterminacy (DOI) project, which examined the statutory and administrative policy frameworks that govern prison release (and thus time served) in each state, evaluated how these policies produced sizeable changes to time served in Colorado, and explored how back-end release discretion affects prison population levels across the United States.  This brief summarizes the relevant findings from the DOI project and provides additional analysis of the relationship between sentence length and time served.

Key Takeaways

• Actual time served in prison is often quite different from the sentence length pronounced in court, and therefore sentence length alone only partially explains the individual and policy-level implications of long sentences.
• The relationship between sentence length and time served varies greatly across states and jurisdictions due to the difference in the legal and statutory framework that governs prison release.
• States that have higher than average sentence length also have higher than average time served, but the relationship between these two factors is modest.
• The average judicial maximum sentence in states with highly indeterminate systems (7 years) is twice as long as in highly determinate states (3.5 years). However, the difference in average time served in highly indeterminate and highly determinate states is much narrower, ranging between 2.1 and 2.6 years.
• Some states are much more likely to impose long prison sentences than others. The proportion of people entering prison with long sentences ranges from 2% in Colorado to 66% in Michigan.
• Individuals serving long sentences in states with highly determinate systems spend, on average, nearly three times as long in prison as individuals serving long sentences in states with highly indeterminate systems.
• Nationally, back-end factors such as the allocation of sentence credit discounts, and for paroling states, the parole release framework explain more of the variation (60%) of average time served than variation in average sentence length (40%).
• States with identical average sentence length can have different average time served based on the degree of indeterminacy and back-end factors. For example, Oregon and Texas both had an average sentence length of 4.4 years in 2016, yet the average time served in Texas (2.1 years), a state with a high degree of indeterminacy, was lower than in Oregon (3.5 years), a state with a low degree of indeterminacy.

Prior related posts on CCJ's Task Force on Long Sentences:

• Notable CCJ new task force examining long prison terms
• Council on Criminal Justice releases "Long Sentences by the Numbers" 
• Council on Criminal Justice releases "Long Sentences: An International Perspective" 
• Council on Criminal Justice releases Illinois analysis of "The Public Safety Impact of Shortening Lengthy Prison Terms" 
• CCJ releases "Long sentences, better outcomes: Opportunities to improve prison programming" 

BJS releases data on "Correctional Populations" and "Probation and Parole" at end of 2021

The Bureau of Justice Statistics today released its latest detailed accounting of national correctional populations and populations on probation and parole at the close of 2021. This BJS press release reports on some highlights and provides links to the full documents with lots and lots of data:

The total correctional population in the United States fell 1% from yearend 2020 to 2021, according to statistics in Correctional Populations in the United States, 2021 – Statistical Tables and Probation and Parole in the United States, 2021, two reports released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.  The number of persons held in prison or jail or supervised in the community on probation or parole decreased by 61,100, down to an estimated 5,444,900.  Overall, an estimated 1 in 48 U.S. residents age 18 or older were under correctional supervision at yearend 2021, down from 1 in 47 in 2020.

“Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant short-term changes in correctional estimates, the overall correctional population continues to decline,” said Dr. Alexis Piquero, Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Over the 10-year period from 2011 to 2021, the U.S. correctional population declined 22%.  A drop in the number of persons supervised in the community on probation accounted for 65% of this overall change, while decreases in the number of persons incarcerated in state and federal prison accounted for 26% of the change. 

In 2021, the U.S. incarceration rate increased for the first time in 15 years.  However, the rate was still lower than the pre-COVID-19 pandemic rate of 810 per 100,000 in 2019.  The increase in the incarceration rate was driven by a 16% growth in the number of persons housed in local jails, which held an additional 87,200 persons from 2020 to 2021.

In 2021, the community supervision rate fell to a 21-year low of 1,440 persons on probation or parole per 100,000 adult U.S. residents, after declining each year since it peaked at 2,240 persons per 100,000 in 2007. At yearend 2021, an estimated 3,745,000 adults were under community supervision, down 136,600 persons from January 1, 2021. During 2021, the probation population decreased in 31 states and in the U.S. federal system and increased in 18 states and the District of Columbia. The rate of adults on probation in 2021 was at its lowest point in 36 years (1,143 per 100,000 adult U.S. residents)....

Changes in the demographic characteristics of the U.S. correctional population were small from 2020 to 2021 but were greater than 20% over the decade from 2011 to 2021.  The number of males in the total correctional population declined less than 1% (down 28,300) from 2020 to 2021, while the number of females decreased 3% (down 32,800). Compared to 2011, the number of males under correctional supervision in 2021 declined by 21% and females decreased 25%.  Over that same decade, the number of black persons under correctional supervision decreased more than 27%, while the number of Hispanic persons declined 21% and whites declined 20%.

“It is important to note that while blacks and Hispanics remain incarcerated at greater rates than whites, we are seeing long-term reductions in those differences,” said Director Piquero.

Correctional Populations in the United States, 2021 – Statistical Tables was written by BJS Statisticians E. Ann Carson, PhD, and Richard Kluckow, DSW. It provides statistics from several BJS data collections on persons living in the community while supervised by probation or parole agencies and those incarcerated under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities or in the custody of local jails.

Probation and Parole in the United States, 2021 was written by BJS Statistician Danielle Kaeble. Findings are from BJS’s Annual Probation Survey, Annual Parole Survey and Federal Justice Statistics Program, which are the only national data collections that cover community corrections in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. federal system.

US Sentencing Commission to begin series of public hearings on its proposed guideline amendments

For sentencing fans looking for binge-worthy viewing and reading, the United States Sentencing Commission is on the verge of starting a series of public hearings concerning  its many proposed amendments to the US Sentencing Guidelines.  The hearing, which start Thursday morning at 9am EST, will be live-streamed at this link.  That link details that the hearing is scheduled to run all day on February 23 and for half the day on February 24 and during these two days "the Commission [will] receive testimony on proposed amendments to the federal sentencing guidelines related to Compassionate Release, Sex Abuse of a Ward, and Acquitted Conduct."

I count a full 25 witnesses scheduled for Thursday's hearing which is just considering guideline amendment for compassionate release.  Nearly all the written testimony for these witnesses can be found linked within the USSC's hearing schedule.  I doubt I will get a chance to review more than a few of the statements, and I welcome readers helping to flag written testimony that seems particularly notable.  There are "only" 12 witnesses scheduled for Friday's hearing covering sex abuse of a ward, and acquitted conduct.  A quick review of the seven statements concerning acquitted conduct reveal a wide variety of opinions from a wide variety of witnesses.

And if that's not enough for sentencing fans, the Commission today also noticed here its plans for a second two-day public hearing on Tuesday, March 7 and Wednesday, March 8.  As the notice explains, the "purpose of the public hearing is for the Commission to receive testimony on proposed amendments related to Firearms, Fake Pills and the First Step Act-Drug Offenses, Circuit Conflicts, Career Offender, and Criminal History."

ABA Criminal Justice Section releases "2023 Plea Bargain Task Force Report"

American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section Plea Bargaining Task Force today released this 40-page report. The report's introduction provides some background and details concerning its work:

The Plea Bargain Task Force formed in 2019 to address persistent criticisms of the plea bargain system in the United States. Plea bargaining has become the primary way to resolve criminal cases. Indeed, some jurisdictions have not had a criminal trial in many years, resolving all their cases through negotiated resolutions.  For this reason, a critical examination of the modern plea system is necessary and important.

This Report comes after three years of work, during which the Task Force collected and reviewed testimony from experts in the field and those impacted by the plea system, scholarly and legal reports on plea bargaining, state and federal rules of criminal procedure, and other materials. What has become clear from this process is that plea bargaining is not one monolithic practice. It looks different depending on whether one is in state or federal court, a rural jurisdiction with few lawyers or an urban center with large prosecution and public defender offices.  Even within the same courthouse, informal practices may differ between courtrooms and attorneys.  Although these variations pose a challenge for the development of any one-size-fits-all set of recommendations to reform plea bargaining practices, this Report identifies and addresses numerous concerns with plea bargaining that are common to a wide variety of jurisdictions.  The Report then provides guidance to jurisdictions on how to meet those challenges while also promoting justice, transparency, and fairness.

There are many purported benefits of plea bargaining in the current criminal justice system.  Nearly all jurisdictions have limited resources and plea bargaining provides a mechanism to efficiently resolve cases. By preserving resources this way, jurisdictions are able to direct greater resources to investigations and cases that proceed to trial. Additionally, plea bargaining provides a mechanism to incentivize defendants to cooperate with the government or to accept responsibility for their criminal conduct.  A plea also provides a clear and certain resolution to a case, which offers finality for the defendant, the victim, the courts, and the community. Furthermore, defendants use the plea process to avoid some of the most severe aspects of the criminal system.

In moderation, many of these benefits make sense. But as the Task Force discovered, too often these benefits have become the driving force of criminal adjudication at the cost of more fundamental values. For instance, according to the testimony the Task Force collected, at times, efficiency and finality trump truth-seeking. Furthermore, many benefits of plea bargaining are, when viewed in a different light, a means to mitigate the excessive harshness of the modern American criminal system. In this sense, plea bargaining is not so much providing a benefit as it is a safety valve for quotidian injustice.

Moreover, the Task Force reviewed substantial evidence that defendants—including innocent defendants — are sometimes coerced into taking pleas and surrendering their right to trial.   This happens for a number of reasons. For instance, mandatory sentencing laws often make the risks of taking a case to trial intolerable, and in some cases, prosecutors understand and exploit these fears to induce defendants to plead guilty in cases where they otherwise would prefer to exercise their constitutional right to have the case decided by a jury.  Similarly, mandatory collateral consequences, including the threat of deportation, push defendants to accept pleas in cases they might otherwise fight at trial.

The Task Force also discovered that the integrity of the criminal system is negatively affected by the sheer number of cases resolved by pleas. For example, police and government misconduct often goes unchecked because so few defendants proceed to pre-trial hearings where such misconduct is litigated.  The reality that so few pretrial matters are litigated leads prosecutors to be less critical of their witnesses and less willing to scrutinize the strength of their cases, knowing that they won’t be held accountable at trial. Defense lawyers, similarly, are less likely to properly investigate cases, knowing their clients will almost certainly  take a plea. Plea bargaining creates perverse incentives across the system for lawyers and judges who focus on disposition rates and getting through cases quickly rather than resolving cases justly. Furthermore, the loss of trials in favor of plea bargains is a profound loss for civic engagement. Jury trials provide critical oversight to the criminal system, and juries remain one of the only ways for citizens to shape how prosecutors enforce laws. The voice of the community is almost entirely lost in a system dominated by pleas.

More troubling still, the Task Force heard many ways in which plea bargaining promotes and exacerbates existing racial inequality in the criminal system. The Task Force collected testimony from experts in the field who demonstrated that throughout the plea process similarly situated defendants of color fare worse than white defendants. Black defendants in drug cases, for instance, are less likely to receive favorable plea offers that avoid mandatory minimum sentences and, as a result, receive higher sentences for the same charges as white defendants. The same is true for gun cases, in which Black defendants are more often subjected to charge stacking — a technique that allows prosecutors to pile on many charges, increasing the likely sentence after trial and the government’s leverage during plea negotiations – than white defendants.  In fact, across all charges the Task Force found evidence of significant racial disparities in prosecutorial decisions to drop or reduce charges.  For example, white defendants who face initial felony charges are less likely than Black defendants to be convicted of a felony, and white defendants facing misdemeanor charges are more likely than Black defendants to have their cases dismissed or resolved without incarceration.

After this introduction, this report sets forth fourteen principles that inform and structure the rest of the report.  Readers are encouraged to click through to see all the details, though here is the intro to the statement of principles:

While the plea bargaining process in the United States is broad and varied, the Task Force determined that it was vitally important to craft a single set of principles to guide plea practices generally. Those principles, which guide the Report’s more specific observations and recommendations, are listed below. These principles should be shared widely with members of the criminal justice community so that they might influence behavior and decision-making moving forward. These principles represent our conclusions about how plea bargaining should operate within our larger criminal justice system, a system based on the fundamental Constitutional right to trial.

Fourth Circuit panel joins minority of circuits giving broad reading to FIRST-STEP-amended safety valve provision

I have noted in a handful of prior posts some of the notable circuit rulings concerning the complicated language that Congress used in the FIRST STEP Act to expand the statutory safety valve enabling more federal drug defendants to benefit from its authorization for below mandatory-minimum sentences.  A helpful reader made sure I did not miss the latest opinion on this topic, this one coming from a Fourth Circuit panel in US v. Jones, No. 21-4605 (4th Cir. Feb 21, 2023) (available here).  Here is how the opinion starts and concludes:

The safety valve provision found in the First Step Act allows a district court to impose a sentence without regard to a mandatory minimum if certain criteria are met.  Relevant here, the court must find that the defendant “does not have . . . more than 4 criminal history points, . . . a prior 3-point offense, . . . and a prior 2-point violent offense” (the “criminal history characteristics”). 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f)(1) (emphasis added).  Cassity Jones has more than four criminal history points but does not have a prior three-point offense or two-point violent offense.  The district court concluded that a defendant must have all three criminal history characteristics to be ineligible for relief and applied the safety valve in sentencing Jones.  The sole issue on appeal is whether the word “and” in § 3553(f)(1) connecting the criminal history characteristics applies conjunctively or disjunctively.  We conclude that “and” is conjunctive and affirm the district court’s decision....

Ultimately, whether or not this is a prudent policy choice is not for the judiciary to decide: that determination lies solely with the legislative branch.  And “[t]he [G]overnment’s request that we rewrite § 3553(f)(1)’s ‘and’ into an ‘or’ based on the absurdity canon is simply a request for a swap of policy preferences.” Lopez, 998 F.3d at 440.  We cannot “rewrite Congress’s clear and unambiguous text” simply because the Government believes it is better policy for the safety valve to apply to fewer defendants. Id. “The remedy for any dissatisfaction with the results in particular cases lies with Congress and not with this Court.” Griffin v. Oceanic Contractors, Inc., 458 U.S. 564, 576 (1982); see also id. (“Congress may amend the statute; we may not.” (citations omitted)).

Accordingly, we are persuaded that the plain text of § 3553(f)(1) requires a sentencing court to find that a defendant has all three of the listed criminal history characteristics before excluding a defendant from safety valve eligibility.

Helpfully, a footnote early in the opinion details the circuit split over whether "and" means "and" or "and" means "or" in the context of this FIRST STEP Act revision of the application statute:

The circuits are split on this issue.  Compare United States v. Garcon, 54 F.4th 1274 (11th Cir. 2022) (en banc) (concluding that only a defendant with all three criminal history characteristics is ineligible under § 3553(f)(1)), and United States v. Lopez, 998 F.3d 431 (9th Cir. 2021) (same), with United States v. Palomares, 52 F.4th 640 (5th Cir. 2022) (concluding that having any one of the criminal history characteristics renders a defendant ineligible under § 3553(f)(1)), United States v. Pace, 48 F.4th 741 (7th Cir. 2022) (same), United States v. Pulsifer, 39 F.4th 1018 (8th Cir. 2022) (same), and United States v. Haynes, 55 F.4th 1075 (6th Cir. 2022) (same). We find the Eleventh and Ninth Circuits’ decisions convincing and join those circuits.

This split make plain that it is only a matter of time before SCOTUS takes up this matter. And I would hope that SCOTUS would move quickly: according to US Sentencing Commission data, thousands of federal drug defendants each year are being subject to different laws and treated differently at sentencing based on this statutory conflict.

US Supreme Court, in 5-4 ruling, rejects Arizona's claim of proper state-ground basis to uphold death sentence

In an interesting little ruling in a state capital case, the US Supreme Court this morning in Cruz v. Arizona, No. 21–846 (S. Ct. Feb 22, 2023) (available here), rejected an effort by Arizona to preserve a state death sentence on procedural grounds.  The Court's opinion was authored by Justice Sotomayor and joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Kagan, Kavanaugh and Jackson. Here is how the Court's opinion starts and ends:

Petitioner John Montenegro Cruz, a defendant sentenced to death, argued at trial and on direct appeal that his due process rights had been violated by the trial court’s failure to permit him to inform the jury that a life sentence in Arizona would be without parole. See Simmons v. South Carolina, 512 U.S. 154, 161–162 (1994) (plurality opinion); id., at 178 (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment). Those courts rejected Cruz’s Simmons argument, believing, incorrectly, that Arizona’s sentencing and parole scheme did not trigger application of Simmons. See State v. Cruz, 218 Ariz. 149, 160, 181 P.3d 196, 207 (2008).

After the Arizona Supreme Court repeated that mistake in a series of cases, this Court summarily reversed the Arizona Supreme Court in Lynch v. Arizona, 578 U.S. 613 (2016) (per curiam), and held that it was fundamental error to conclude that Simmons “did not apply” in Arizona. 578 U.S., at 615.

Relying on Lynch, Cruz filed a motion for state postconviction relief under Arizona Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.1(g). That Rule permits a defendant to bring a successive petition if “there has been a significant change in the law that, if applicable to the defendant’s case, would probably overturn the defendant’s judgment or sentence.” Ariz. Rule Crim. Proc. 32.1(g) (Cum. Supp. 2022); see also ibid. (Cum. Supp. 2017).

The Arizona Supreme Court denied relief after concluding that Lynch was not a “significant change in the law.” 251 Ariz. 203, 207, 487 P. 3d 991, 995 (2021). The Arizona Supreme Court reached this conclusion despite having repeatedly held that an overruling of precedent is a significant change in the law.  See id., at 206, 487 P. 3d, at 994 (The “‘archetype of such a change occurs when an appellate court overrules previously binding case law’”).

The Court granted certiorari to address whether the Arizona Supreme Court’s holding that Lynch was not a significant change in the law for purposes of Rule 32.1(g) is an adequate and independent state-law ground for the judgment.  It is not....

In exceptional cases where a state-court judgment rests on a novel and unforeseeable state-court procedural decision lacking fair or substantial support in prior state law, that decision is not adequate to preclude review of a federal question.  The Arizona Supreme Court applied Rule 32.1(g) in a manner that abruptly departed from and directly conflicted with its prior interpretations of that Rule.  Accordingly, the judgment of the Supreme Court of Arizona is vacated, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

The  dissent was authored by Justice Barrett and joined by Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch.  It ends this way:

The Court makes a case for why the Arizona Supreme Court’s interpretation of its own precedent is wrong.  If I were on the Arizona Supreme Court, I might agree.  But that call is not within our bailiwick.  Our job is to determine whether the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision is defensible, and we owe the utmost deference to the state court in making that judgment.  Cases of inadequacy are extremely rare, and this is not one.  I respectfully dissent.

"Severe Mental Illness and the Death Penalty: A Menu of Legislative Options"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper authored by Richard J. Bonnie and now available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

In 2003, the American Bar Association established a Task Force on Mental Disability and the Death Penalty to further specify and implement the Supreme Court’s ruling banning execution of persons with intellectual disability and to consider an analogous ban against imposing the death penalty on defendants with severe mental disorders.  The Task Force established formal links with the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the final report was approved by the ABA and the participating organizations in 2005 and 2006.  This brief article focuses primarily on diminished responsibility at the time of the offense, summarizing the reasons why an exclusion for severe mental illness is needed and reviewing the key drafting issues that can be expected to arise in defining the clinical criteria for exclusion.  A key question is whether state trial judges and judges appointed to state appellate courts embrace their constitutionally grounded duties to assure sparing and humane administration of the death penalty.  Assiduous efforts to prevent execution of prisoners with severe mental illness is a necessary element of that judicial assignment.

A glass-half-empty look at federal compassionate release data since FIRST STEP Act

Extrapolating based on the latest data from the US Sentencing Commission, since passage of the FIRST STEP Act in December 2018, nearly 5000 persons have secured a reduced term of imprisonment for "extraordinary and compelling reasons" pursuant to so-called "compassionate release" motions under 3582(c)(1)(A).  This number, which amounts to an average of roughly 100 sentence reduction grants per month, is a 50-times increase from the average of two such reductions per month in the year before the FIRST STEP Act made it possible for prisoners to get their motions directly to courts.  (COVID is a big part of this story: USSC data show many hundreds of grants each month during the second half of 2020 and first part of 2021; grants have average closer to 50 per month through 2022.)

But while sentence reductions grants are much more common since passage of the FIRST STEP Act, they are still not common.  After all, roughly 400,000 persons have served federal prison sentences over the last five years, so only just over 1% of all federal prisoners have secured relief under 3582(c)(1)(A).  And this new NPR piece, headlined "Frail people are left to die in prison as judges fail to act on a law to free them," stresses data detailing how many are not securing relief.  Here are excerpts:

[D]ata from the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows judges rejected more than 80% of compassionate release requests filed from October 2019 through September 2022. Judges made rulings without guidance from the sentencing commission, an independent agency that develops sentencing policies for the courts.

The commission was delayed for more than three years because Congress did not confirm Trump's nominees and President Joe Biden's appointees were not confirmed until August.  As a result, academic researchers, attorneys, and advocates for prison reform said the law has been applied unevenly across the country. 

Later this week, the federal sentencing commission is poised to hold an open meeting in Washington, D.C. to discuss the problem. They'll be reviewing newly proposed guidelines that include, among other things, a provision that would give consideration to people housed in a correctional facility who are at risk from an infectious disease or public health emergency....

The First Step Act brought fresh attention to compassionate release, which had rarely been used in the decades after it was authorized by Congress in the 1980s.  The new law allowed people in prison to file motions for compassionate release directly with federal courts.  Before, only the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons could petition the court on behalf of a sick prisoner, which rarely happened....

The number of applications for compassionate release began soaring in March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic emergency.  Even as COVID devastated prisons, judges repeatedly denied most requests....  Data suggests decisions in federal courts varied widely by geography.  For example, the 2nd Circuit (Connecticut, New York, and Vermont) granted 27% of requests, compared with about 16% nationally.  The 5th Circuit (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) approved about 10 %. Judges in the 11th Circuit (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) approved roughly 11% of requests. In one Alabama district, only six of 141 motions were granted — or about 4% — the sentencing commission data shows....

Sentencing commission officials did not make leaders available to answer questions about whether a lack of guidance from the panel kept sick and dying people behind bars.  The new sentencing commission chair, Carlton Reeves, said during a public hearing in October that setting new guidelines for compassionate release is a top priority.

Interestingly this NPR piece, though seemingly about denials of sentence reductions, focuses on a drug offender with stage 4 cancer who did secure compassionate release last year.  I cannot help but wonder if the reporter was not quite able to find a compelling case in which a sentence reduction was denied for a "frail [person] left to die in prison," though I am sure there are such cases.

Brief dissent from the denial of cert on plea ineffectiveness from Justice Jackson

This morning's Supreme Court order list, which comes after the Justices were off for nearly a month, had no cert grants and had lots and lots and lots of cert denials.  One of those denials, in Davis v. United States, No. 22–5364, prompted this short dissent authored by Justice Jackson and joined by Justice Sotomayor.  Here are excerpts:

Our criminal justice system today is “for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.” Lafler v. Cooper, 566 U.S. 156, 170 (2012). Against this backdrop, this Court has recognized that the loss of an opportunity for a favorable plea offer due to an attorney’s deficient performance can violate the Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel. Id., at 169–170; see also Missouri v. Frye, 566 U.S. 134 (2012). Petitioner Quartavious Davis alleged, and the Eleventh Circuit did not dispute, that he satisfied the first prong of the Strickland ineffective-assistance-of-counsel standard because his attorney failed to initiate plea negotiations with the Government. The question presented, then, is how can a defendant like Davis show “prejudice” as a result of this failure?...

The District Court concluded that Davis’s allegations in his 28 U. S. C. §2255 motion were insufficient, even if true, because he had not alleged “that a plea offer was made but not communicated to [him].”... Moreover, under the circumstances presented here, it was exceedingly likely that Davis would have prevailed with respect to the prejudice prong if the Eleventh Circuit had not applied that threshold requirement.  Davis’s allegations established that a favorable plea agreement was a strong possibility, even though no offer actually materialized, because each of Davis’s five codefendants had lawyers who negotiated favorable plea agreements with respect to the same series of armed robberies.  And while Davis (who was 18 or 19 years old at the time the crimes were committed) received a sentence of approximately 160 years of imprisonment after his attorney took him to trial, all of Davis’s codefendants received sentences of less than 40 years of imprisonment due to plea agreements that enabled the District Court to impose a sentence below the mandatory minimum. T he District Court’s statements at sentencing were also noteworthy: The judge specifically asserted that, while he thought the appropriate sentence for Davis was 40 years, he was bound by the consecutive mandatory minimums.

The Eleventh Circuit gave short shrift to these alleged facts, and others, which suggest that Davis was harmed by his counsel’s failure to initiate plea negotiations because it applied a bright-line rule that prejudice cannot be shown in the absence of a plea offer.  This petition presents the Court with a clear opportunity to resolve a Circuit split regarding whether having an actual plea offer is an indispensable prerequisite to making the necessary showing of prejudice.  I would grant certiorari to resolve that issue.

How long until the Supreme Court takes up another Second Amendment case after Bruen?

As detailed in a number of prior posts, the Supreme Court's landmark Bruen Second Amendment decision has created considerable legal uncertainty, especially for various federal gun control laws.   And, as two recent press pieces highlight, it seems like only a matter of time, given the lower-court churn over application of Bruen, before the Justices are going to have to engage with all the post-Bruen jurisprudence.

From the AP, "Turmoil in courts on gun laws in wake of justices’ ruling."  An excerpt:

Courts in recent months have declared unconstitutional federal laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, felony defendants and people who use marijuana.  Judges have shot down a federal ban on possessing guns with serial numbers removed and gun restrictions for young adults in Texas and have blocked the enforcement of Delaware’s ban on the possession of homemade “ghost guns.”

In several instances, judges looking at the same laws have come down on opposite sides on whether they are constitutional in the wake of the conservative Supreme Court majority’s ruling.  The legal turmoil caused by the first major gun ruling in a decade will likely force the Supreme Court to step in again soon to provide more guidance for judges.

From USA Today, "As nation reels from Michigan State shooting, courts wrestle with access to guns."  An excerpt:

The Supreme Court has said a lot recently about what the Second Amendment means. The next question for the justices may be: Who does it not apply to?

A series of criminal cases percolating in lower federal courts are striking at a question about when the government may deny someone -- such as a person convicted of a nonviolent felony -- access to a gun.  Experts on both sides of the gun debate say the question is likely to make its way to the Supreme Court soon.

For various reasons, I suspect the Justices will be inclined to avoid taking up these matters for as long as possible.  It was, after all, a dozen years between the the last major Second Amendment ruling (McDonald) and Bruen.  But, in part because numerous lower-court rulings are striking down numerous federal criminal laws, I suspect the Justices will have to get back to these matters pretty soon. 

"Pretty soon" in Supreme Court timelines likely still means a year or two, perhaps even longer. But I welcome in the comments any and all predictions as to when, and what kind of, a case ultimately serves as the vehicle for SCOTUS to clarify just where Bruen will take Second Amendment jurisprudence.

Reviewing pandemic-era increases in prison deaths

This new New York Times piece provides a review of the increase in prison deaths reasonably attributed to the COVID pandemic. The piece carries this full title: "As the Pandemic Swept America, Deaths in Prisons Rose Nearly 50 Percent:‌ The first comprehensive data on prison fatalities in the Covid era sheds new light on where and why prisoners were especially vulnerable." Here is how the piece starts:

Deaths in state and federal prisons across America rose nearly 50 percent during the first year of the pandemic, and in six states they more than doubled, according to the first comprehensive data on prison fatalities in the era of Covid-19.

The tremendous jump in deaths in 2020 was more than twice the increase in the United States overall, and even exceeded estimates of the percentage increase at nursing homes, among the hardest-hit sectors nationwide. In many states, the data showed, high rates continued in 2021.

While there was ample evidence that prisons were Covid hot spots, an examination of the data by The New York Times underscored how quickly the virus rampaged through crowded facilities, and how an aging inmate population, a correctional staffing shortage and ill-equipped medical personnel combined to make prisoners especially vulnerable during the worst public health crisis in a century.

“There are so many who passed away due to not getting the medical care they needed,” said Teresa Bebeau, whose imprisoned friend died from complications of Covid and cancer in South Carolina. “Most of these people, they didn’t go in there with death sentences, but they’re dying.”

Covid infections drove the death totals, but inmates also succumbed to other illnesses, suicide and violence, according to the data, which was collected by law school researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and provides a more detailed, accurate look at deaths in prison systems during the pandemic than earlier efforts.

Altogether, at least 6,182 people died in American prisons in 2020, compared with 4,240 the previous year, even as the country’s prison population declined to about 1.3 million from more than 1.4 million.

Several of the states with the highest mortality rates in 2020 had a history of elevated prison deaths, including Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina and West Virginia. Researchers said the high numbers — 96 deaths per 10,000 prisoners in West Virginia, more than in any other state — stemmed from long sentences, harsh conditions and relatively poor public health overall.