US Sentencing Commission releases latest "compassionate release" data through Sept 2023

The US Sentencing Commission has now released its very latest data on sentence reduction motions on this webpage, which also includes additional graphics and context about court dispositions of what are typically known as "compassionate release" motions.  This Fiscal Year 2023 data run includes information through September 2023 (which is technically before the Commission's new guideline became law, but after it had been submitted to Congress).

As I have noted before, the long-term data going back to the height of the COVID pandemic period reveals, unsurprisingly, that we now see in FY 2023 many fewer sentence reduction motions filed or granted.  Though there are month-to-month variations, it would be roughly accurate to say that an average month of FY 2023 had a few dozen compassionate release motions granted and a few hundred of these motions denied nationwide.  In will be interesting to see if the relatively stable monthly patterns here change in any significant way in FY 2024 when the Commission's new guideline became the new law of the land (as of November 2023).

As I have noted before, among the striking stories in these data are the variations in application and grant rates from various districts.  As one example from the FY 2023 data, the Eastern District of Michigan granted half of a small number of sentence reduction motions (5 of only 10), whereas the Western District of Michigan granted none of a large number of sentence reduction motions (0 of only 60).  Similarly, the Northern District of Illinois granted nearly half of these motions in FY 2023 (13 of 27), whereas the Central and Southern District of Illinois each granted only one such motion out of a pool of 44 motions. 

There are all sorts of other interesting data points in this new report.  For example, it seems that a distinctively larger number of drug defendants secured sentencing reductions in FY 2023 (making up roughly 60% of the reduction grants while comprising only roughly 45% of the federal prison population).  Also, reasons reported by judges for granting these motions are also intriguing.