Sentencing Law and Policy

Rounding up some coverage and commentary on criminal justice issues in the 2024 race for the White House

Both former Prez Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris have lengthy and nuanced criminal justice histories and records as politicians, and Trump also has recent experiences as a criminal defendant and Harris has past experiences as a criminal prosecutor.  I do not think these rich histories enable easy summarization nor obvious prognostication about what these presidential candidates might do over the next four years if elected.  Nevertheless, since I am seeing a number of press pieces seeking to cover criminal justice angles in the race for the White House, I figured a abridged round-up was in order:

From ABC News, "How do Harris and Trump's records on criminal justice compare?"

From Bloomberg, "Harris Can’t Let Republicans Define Her Record on Crime for Her"

From The Bulwark, "Criminal Justice Reform: Trump’s Indifference vs. Harris’s Mixed Record"

From the Chicago Tribune, "Voters don’t want to hear Trump and Harris fight over crime. They want to hear the best solutions."

From The Hill, "What a Harris-Walz ticket could mean for criminal justice reform"

From the New York Times, "Kamala Harris and the Return of ‘Tough on Crime’"

"State Legislatures and the Uptake Puzzle in Expungement of Criminal Records"

The title of this post is the title of this recent paper available via SSRN and authored by Jessica Steinberg and Elenore Wade. Here is its abstract:

Expungement has an uptake problem.  A recent explosion of state-level rights allows people with felony convictions to expunge their criminal record, but only 1 to 6 percent of eligible people avail themselves of the remedy.  Expungement is a powerful policy tool that promotes social and economic reintegration.  It also serves a dignitary purpose, allowing people with criminal records to unshackle themselves from past mistakes.  One might assume people would rush to court to clear their records.  That the opposite is occurring — and new laws are idling on the books —suggests that rights-creation in this space has not been efficacious.  This demands a hard look at the mechanics of expungement to ferret out possible reasons for the stagnation of the most sprawling and ambitious policy attempt in recent history to address the collateral consequences of mass criminalization.

This article tackles the uptake puzzle in expungement of criminal records.  Employing an access-to-justice framework and drawing from the literature on administrative burden, the article presents findings from a study that identifies uptake barriers embedded in the workings of formal law and institutions.  We systematically analyzed the law and procedure governing expungement of felony convictions in all thirty-two states that allow for it.  We then developed six metrics to study, all within the control of the formal institutions responsible for creating or administering expungement policy.  These metrics investigated access to the expungement remedy in light of the unique legal regime in each state and allowed us to create a state-by-state comparison of whether and to what extent courts and legislatures developed the conditions necessary for a person seeking felony expungement to complete the process successfully.  Our study uncovered access barriers to expungement uptake across three domains: informational, procedural, and financial.  These barriers reflect governmental decisions to shift uptake burdens to ordinary people and enshrine those burdens in formal law.  The article provides rich qualitative analysis of these access barriers as one way to account for the uptake puzzle.  With these findings, we elevate access challenges as both central to the efficacy of expungement policy and as eminently avoidable.

In addition, the article offers two broad implications from our research that point the road forward on reform.  First, we find that legislatures play a surprisingly dominant role in restricting access to the expungement remedy.  By probing the under explored role of legislatures, we surface a more complex treatment of how access barriers are layered across institutions to keep the expungement remedy out of reach.  Second, we suggest that each state has developed a de facto “access policy” that serves an adjunctive role to substantive expungement policy. Without exception, these access policies are haphazard in their expression and work at cross-purposes with the stated goals of expungement.  We call on legislatures to leverage their substantial convening power to study the real-world circumstances of expungement applicants.  We also call on states to draw on the pluralistic access landscape we depict in this Article to turn toward access-promoting choices that increase uptake.

US Sentencing Commission continues releasing updated "Quick Facts" publications

I am pleased to see that the US Sentencing Commission is continuing to release new sets of its terrific "Quick Facts" publications with updates drawing on the USSC's full fiscal year 2023 data.  Long-time readers know I cannot praise the USSC enough for producing these convenient and informative short data documents, which are designed to "give readers basic facts about a single area of federal crime in an easy-to-read, two-page format."  I flagged an early set of updated Quick Facts here a few months ago, and here are the newest sets of postings by the USSC on the "Quick Facts" page from June July and August:

Offender Groups

• NEW Non-U.S. Citizens (July 2024)

Drugs

• NEW Powder Cocaine Trafficking (June 2024)
• NEW Crack Cocaine Trafficking (June 2024)
• NEW Marijuana Trafficking (June 2024)
• NEW Oxycodone Trafficking (June 2024)
• NEW Heroin Trafficking (July 2024)

Firearm Offenses

• NEW Section 924(c) (June 2024)
• NEW Section 922(g) (June 2024)

Immigration Offenses

• NEW Illegal Reentry (July 2024)
• NEW Alien Smuggling (July 2024)

Economic Offenses

• NEW Theft, Property Destruction, and Fraud (August 2024)
• NEW Aggravated Identity Theft (August 2024)
• NEW Bribery (August 2024)
• NEW Counterfeiting (August 2024)
• NEW Money Laundering (August 2024)

Former Prez Trump's lawyers move to "adjourn any sentencing" following his NY convictions "until after the 2024 Presidential election"

As reported here in The Hill, "Former President Trump asked the New York judge who oversaw his recent criminal trial to delay his sentencing until after November’s presidential election." Here is more:

Judge Juan Merchan previously agreed to push the date back until September so he can first decide whether the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision requires tossing Trump’s guilty verdict.

“[S]etting aside naked election-interference objectives, there is no valid countervailing reason for the Court to keep the current sentencing date on the calendar,” Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a letter to the judge, which was made public Thursday. “There is no basis for continuing to rush,” the letter continued. “Accordingly, we respectfully request that any sentencing, if one is needed, be adjourned until after the Presidential election.”

In May, a New York jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from voters.... Trump’s sentencing in New York was originally slated for July, but the judge pushed it back to Sept. 18 after the Supreme Court carved out at least presumptive criminal immunity for former presidents’ official acts.

Trump does not claim immunity from the hush money charges themselves, but he asserts that prosecutors at trial improperly introduced immunized evidence, so his verdict must be wiped as a result. Prosecutors have pushed back on the argument, and Merchan is set to rule on the matter two days before sentencing. Trump’s attorneys said the small gap is an “unreasonably short period of time,” signaling the former president will immediately attempt to appeal if the judge rejects his immunity arguments. “The requested adjournment is also necessary to allow President Trump adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options in response to adverse ruling,” the letter reads.

The letter also noted Merchan’s third refusal to recuse from the case Wednesday. Trump’s lawyers have latched onto the judge’s daughter’s employment at a digital agency that does work for prominent Democrats, but the judge has insisted he has no conflict, citing guidance from a state ethics advisory group. “Notwithstanding the Court’s ruling on the disputed recusal issue, the requested adjournment would prospectively mitigate the asserted conflicts and appearances of impropriety, which are also the subject of an ongoing congressional inquiry,” Blanche and Bove wrote in the letter.

The full letter from Trump's lawyers to Judge Merchan is available at this link.

"Can Prosecutorial Declination End Overincarceration?"

The title of this post is the title of this recent article available via SSRN authored by Shima Baradaran Baughman. Here is its abstract:

We know very little about why prosecutors charge a given case, how frequently they charge, and why they decline to charge cases.  Scholars have discussed this issue despite the acknowledged “black box” around this question.  Some have recently argued that progressive prosecution has influenced prosecutors to decline more cases.  Others discuss rates of individual state and federal declination — showing high rates particularly for federal districts.  One scholar has suggested that private prosecution might be the only viable alternative to public prosecution.  Overall crime has certainly gone down in the U.S. and arrests have also dropped.  But prosecutors have not necessarily reduced charging in commensurate ways.  Given what we know about mass incarceration and prosecutors’ inordinate ability to exercise discretion in the criminal process, are prosecutors inclined to decline cases?  What might factor in their decision?

This Article focuses on the largest national field experiment on prosecutors to provide some insight to how American prosecutors might analyze and decide to charge a given case.  In some respects, the data are insightful because they take away any resource constraints or evidentiary limitations in charging a case.  The data show that prosecutors, when given the opportunity, would almost always charge a case — even when many factors indicate that they should do otherwise.  What this national data tells us about prosecutorial charging and declination may demonstrate that we have not made as much “progress” in terms of prosecution as we might have hoped. Declining to charge might never be a prosecutorial tool to end mass incarceration.

Noting how California initiative to roll back Prop 47 is creating political divide

"Where you stand depends on where you sit" and "All politics is local" are two old chestnuts in the political world. This new Politico article, headlined "Why a tough-on-crime initiative is splitting California’s Democrats," tells a variation on this story in conjunction with west-coast criminal justice reform initiative. Here are excperts:

If you want to know where California Democrats stand on the tough-on-crime Proposition 36, look at where they sit.

On one side of the ballot-measure contest are the Capitol’s top Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, who have fought efforts to roll back parts of Prop 47, the landmark 2014 criminal justice ballot initiative that downgraded certain theft and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

On the other side are big-city mayors like San Francisco Mayor London Breed and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, who have argued that strengthened penalties are necessary to assuage their constituents’ growing concerns about public safety.  They have been joined by organizations like the League of California Cities and the California Contract Cities Association, which represent the interests of city hall officials statewide.

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and two local officials — Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho and Elk Grove Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen — are now launching their own committee supporting Prop 36.  They hope the Common Sense for Safety committee will open space for other Democratic office-holders willing to cross Newsom and other prominent state officials....

When prosecutors and big-box retailers came forward earlier this year with their initiative to restore harsh penalties for non-violent crimes, Newsom and legislative leaders began working to get it off the ballot.  After failing to persuade the initiative’s proponents to drop their quest and abandoning plans to promote an anti-crime measure of their own, the Capitol’s top Democrats are leading the charge against Prop 36.  They warn the measure will take California back to the era of mass incarceration and cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

It has not stopped Democratic mayors and other local officeholders from coming out in favor of the initiative.  Yes on Prop 36, the main campaign committee supporting the initiative, has put out a steady drumbeat of endorsements from local-level politicians, including many Democrats....  Local officials and organizations that represent them say there are clear reasons for the measure’s strong support on the local level: They’re less insulated from the effects of retail theft and drug issues than politicians in Sacramento, giving them more of an on-the-ground perspective on how dire the situation really is.

The Sentencing Project releases updated report on “Youth Justice By The Numbers”

The Sentencing Project released today this new version of a report titled, “Youth Justice By The Numbers.”  The first two sentences of this ten-page report spotlights its main themes: "Between 2000-2022, there was a 75% decline in youth incarceration. However, racial and ethnic disparities in youth incarceration and sentencing persist amidst overall decrease in youth offending." Here is how this report gets started with its "introduction":

Youth arrests and incarceration increased in the closing decades of the 20th century but have fallen sharply since.  Public opinion often lags behind these realities, wrongly assuming both that crime is perpetually increasing and that youth offending is routinely violent.  In fact, youth offending is predominantly non-violent, and the 21st century has seen significant declines in youth arrests and incarceration.  Despite positive movement on important indicators, far too many youth — disproportionately youth of color — are incarcerated.  Between 2000 and 2022, the number of youth held in juvenile justice facilities fell from 108,800 to 27,600 — a 75% decline.

Rounding up some coverage and commentary of recent data showing violent crime down so far in 2024

In this post late last week, I highlighted the encouraging midyear 2024 violent crime data in this lastest report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.  That report shows declines in four major violent crime categories in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period last year.  Having now seen a number of pieces discussing these and related crime data, I figured a follow-up round-up was in order: 

From Axios, "New data shows violent crime dropping sharply in major U.S. cities"

From Fox News, "Homicides are plunging in Biden’s last year compared to Trump’s: report"

From the New York Post, "Democrats are hiding the rise in violent crime with tricky statistics"

From Reason, "Trump Falsely Claims That 'Homicides Are Skyrocketing,' an Imaginary Trend He Blames on Kamala Harris"

From Salon, "'Remarkable': Despite GOP fear-mongering, experts say new crime data shows US 'safest' in decades"

From Vox, "Violent crime is plummeting. Why?"

From the Washington Examiner, "Violent crime dropped compared to 2023 in major cities: Report"

"Taking Stock: Reflections on 50 Years of Crime and Punishment in America"

The title of this post is the title of this notable keynote speech delivered this week by Jeremy Travis at the annual conference of the National Criminal Justice Association. I recommend reading the speech in full, as Travis explains in the introduction that he hopes to "challenge you to think critically about the realities of crime and punishment in America so that you can help our democracy chart a new course to a more just and humane response to crime." It strikes a notably positive reform tone, and this 14-page document concludes this way:

We have much work ahead of us, but this is the time to embrace an ambitious agenda.  The American system of criminal justice stands at a crossroads. With low crime rates, public support for less punitive responses to crime, and an urgent call from the next generation to do no more harm and embrace the call for racial justice, a window of opportunity has opened.  I can think of no group of justice professionals better equipped to seize this moment.  I believe with all my heart that this is a patriotic calling.  The cause of justice, and the hopes for a vibrant multi-racial democracy, hang in the balance. It may take another fifty years, but now is always the best time to get started.

"Justice for None: How Marsy's Law Undermines the Criminal Legal System"

The title of this post is the title of this lengthy new report released today by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.  Here is part of the report's executive summary:

Marsy’s Law is the colloquial name for a model Victims’ Bill of Rights that enshrines victims’ rights within state constitutions. Marsy’s Law was first passed in California in 2008 and has since been adopted in 12 states....

This report aims to shed light on the impact of Marsy’s Law.  While Marsy’s Law proponents argue that the impact on due process for accused individuals has been minimal while the benefits for victims have been immense, legal challenges and news reports from impacted states suggest otherwise.  Many of the provisions of Marsy’s Law are impractical and conflict with the constitutional due process protections for defendants.  There is a need for systematic scrutiny of Marsy’s Law across impacted states to study its impact including identifying challenges, unintended consequences, and the gaps in the collective knowledge and awareness of its effects.  While there has been vocal opposition to Marsy’s Law from many stakeholders including defense attorneys, civil rights groups, a bipartisan group of state legislators, legal experts, victim advocates, and police chiefs and sheriffs, these critiques have largely been siloed within their respective states.

This report synthesizes existing information on Marsy’s Law and presents the findings of new research on the effects of Marsy’s Law in impacted states.  Case law, legal and expert analysis, stakeholder experiences, and empirical research are utilized to provide insights on the impact and consequences of Marsy’s Law on the criminal legal system, including effects on accused individuals, victims, and public safety. In addition to the secondary data (e.g., court rulings, newspaper articles, press releases), a mixed-methods approach was used to gather data from stakeholders in impacted states.  The aim of this research was to obtain an understanding of how Marsy’s Law has impacted the criminal legal system in their states, and their experiences before and after implementation.  A quantitative survey instrument was designed and administered to a variety of stakeholders.  This report presents the results of the experiences of defense attorneys (n=299) in impacted states.  Second, focus groups with defense attorneys and other relevant stakeholders were conducted to bring to light in-depth expertise and experiences with Marsy’s Law.

Notable new DPIC analysis of exonerations for those sentenced to death

The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) has this notable new analysis of death row exonerations. Here is how the report, which is titled "New Analysis: Innocent Death-Sentenced Prisoners Wait Longer than Ever for Exoneration," gets started:

On July 1, after waiting 41 years for his name to be cleared, Larry Roberts became the 200th person exonerated from death row.  A new Death Penalty Information Center analysis finds that Mr. Roberts’ experience illustrates a troubling trend: for innocent death-sentenced prisoners, the length of time between wrongful conviction and exoneration is increasing.  In the past twenty years, the average length of time before exoneration has roughly tripled, and 2024 has the highest-ever average wait before exoneration, at 38.7 years.  Our research suggests that two of the factors contributing to this phenomenon are procedural rules restricting prisoner appeals and resistance by state officials to credible claims of innocence.

"The Victims' Rights Mismatch"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Lee Kovarsky now available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

A puzzling mismatch lurks inside victims’ rights law.  Victims’ rights are most easily justified when held by living victims, but the cultural movement has triumphed largely as a response to crime-caused death.  This Article identifies the mismatch between victims’ rights and their justifications in dead-victim cases, analyzes the normative questions involved, and recommends an institutional response.

The mismatch persists because American jurisdictions assign a single bundle of rights to anyone denominated as a “victim.”  In dead-victim cases, however, the primary bearers of interpersonal harm are gone.  Instead, their rights are assumed by aggrieved family members and legal estates.  In those third-party scenarios, justifications for victim participation and influence collapse.

Mismatch presents normative problems along two dimensions.  Along the deontological one: rights to expression and confrontation expire with dead victims, third-party input doesn’t provide information about retributively significant harm, and dead-victim cases immorally sensitize punishment to the social worth of decedents.  Along the consequentialist dimension, third-party involvement affects punishment at margins that have no plausible effect on deterrence or incapacitation, and victim involvement can’t promote legitimacy when it estranges vulnerable communities.

A better institutional response is straightforward: victims’ rights should be tiered.  In dead-victim cases, they must always be conceptualized as the first-party rights of survivors, rather than third-party rights asserted on behalf of decedents.  Surviving harm bearers can retain rights to notice, protection, and even restitution, but rights to other forms of participation and influence should be severely restricted.

Noting Prez Biden's appointments to balance federal judiciary with more defenders

This new Bloomberg Law piece, headlined "Biden Public Defenders Turned Judges Begin to Make Mark on Bench," details what might be Prez Biden's most significant legacy in his judicial nominations.  I recommend the piece in full, and here is its essential data:

Presidents who’ve prioritized diversity in their judicial appointments have historically focused on expanding the racial and gender makeup of the courts.  But in recent years, judicial advocates have also called for Democrats to appoint more lawyers who’ve represented criminal defendants and civil rights plaintiffs — legal experience that’s been historically underrepresented in the federal judiciary.

Judges who’ve predominantly worked in private practice and as federal prosecutors made up more than 70% of the appellate bench at the time of a 2020 Center for American Progress study.  That’s compared to 1% of circuit judges who spent most of their careers as public defenders or within a legal aid setting.

Biden has sought to upend that trend by making it a priority to appoint former public defenders to the federal bench at a historic pace in just one term.  According to a Bloomberg Law analysis, Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton added at least 39 and 31 ex-public defenders to the courts, respectively, but that was over two terms.

Out of his 205 life-tenured appointments, 42, or 20%, have spent part of their careers as public defenders, such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.  That number also includes 11 ex-public defenders to the federal circuit courts, breaking the previous record of five former public defenders appointed to those courts under Obama.

New press analysis reports juveniles sentenced as adults in Florida get longer sentences than adults

The Miami Herald has this notable and lengthy new article about juvenile sentencing headlined "‘Very disturbing’: Florida teens get longer prison sentences than adults."  Here are some of the details:

Florida is one of 13 states that give prosecutors unfettered power to try children as adults without getting sign-off from a judge.  And when judges determine the penalties for those kids, they give them higher sentences on average for felony crimes than older, adult offenders, according to a Miami Herald investigation....

Florida judges have the option to give teenage offenders “juvenile sanctions,” which send them to a juvenile facility rather than prison, or classify them as “youthful offenders,” resulting in either probation or being confined at a camp with other convicted young adults for up to six years.... Only one in 10 of the more than 20,000 children tried as adults in Florida were given juvenile sanctions and less than 5% received a “youthful offender” designation, the Herald found in an analysis of the last 15 years of state court system sentencing data from 2008 to 2022....

Children tried as adults were sentenced to a little more than three years in prison on average for third-degree felonies — around 50% longer than the average sentence given to adults for the same class of offense. The vast majority of all felony charges are third-degree offenses, which are the lowest class of felony crimes and include burglary, some types of assault, drug possession and certain DUI offenses. Children and adults had similar average sentences for more serious offenses that fall under first and second-degree felonies.

Overall, a child tried as an adult was sentenced to a little more than five years for a felony charge while an adult received around three-and-a-half years. These trends held even after the Herald adjusted for the most extreme sentences that could skew the figures.

Though it is hard to assess the Herald analysis, I am not sure these data should be all that shocking if Florida prosecutors generally tend to bring only the most aggravated juvenile offenders into adult courts for adult sentencing.  If only the very worst of juvenile offenders in Florida are sentenced like adults in adult courts, it should not be too surprising that their average sentences are longer than the full array of adult offenders, many of whom, comparatively speaking, may be less serious offenders.  (At the risk of providing a confusing (and imperfect) sports analogy, this would be like noting that the top 50 minor league home run hitters, on average, hit more home runs than all average major league hitters.)

"Regarding the Other Death Penalty"

The title of this post is the title of this relatively short piece just out in the Columbia Law Review Forum and authored by Kempis Songster, Terrell Carter & Rachel López.  Here is how it starts:

In his compelling new book, Invisible Atrocities, Professor Randle DeFalco explores the function of the aesthetics of violence in international law.  In particular, he questions international law’s preference for sanctioning spectacular demonstrations of violence rather than more banal, bureaucratic actions that cause massive scales of suffering and misery.  The book resonated with us because we’ve seen the same dynamic at work in U.S. criminal law with respect to society’s views on two forms of the death penalty: capital punishment and life without parole (LWOP).

Two of us, Kempis Songster and Terrell Carter (affectionately known as Ghani and Rell), intimately understand the invisibility of the harm DeFalco describes.  Our sentence — a sentence of life without parole — was sold by the anti–death penalty movement as the more humane alternative to capital punishment.  Yet, since our miserable state of existence serving life without parole tainted a word so full as “life,” we believe that this sentence “is more aptly called death by incarceration” (DBI).  Taking inspiration from DeFalco’s book, we aim to bring visibility to the slow but fatal violence of death by incarceration.

Longest sentence given to actual Jan 6 rioter, 20 years in federal prison, handed down late last week

This Politico piece, headlined "‘Political violence personified’: Jan. 6 defendant gets 20 years for string of vicious attacks on police," reports on the handing down of the longest sentence given to any person actually involved in the Jan 6 riot.  Here are some details with some sentencing context involving some other Jan 6 defendants:

A California man who cracked the face shield of one police officer, unloaded pepper spray on others and bludgeoned countless officers with poles, boards and even his feet was sentenced to 20 years in prison Friday, the longest sentence handed down to any participant in the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Prosecutors called David Dempsey “political violence personified,” and U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth agreed, saying that even on a day that “will be seared into our nation’s memory as a bloodbath,” Dempsey’s conduct was “exceptionally egregious.”

Of the more than 1,400 people charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack — a violent assault by supporters of former President Donald Trump seeking to prevent the transfer of power to President Joe Biden — only former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has been sentenced to a lengthier prison term: 22 years. But Tarrio was not present at the Capitol that day. Rather, a jury convicted him of orchestrating a plan for his Proud Boys allies to breach the Capitol and help the larger mob overwhelm police.

Dempsey’s sentence outstrips even the one handed down to Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison last year for similarly orchestrating a plan to violently impede the transfer of power.

Not only did Dempsey, who pleaded guilty to assault, persist in his violence for hours on Jan. 6, but he also came to the Capitol with a massive rap sheet that included other instances of political violence. Throughout the riot, Dempsey placed himself at the center of the most violent episodes, particularly in the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace tunnel, the site of the most extreme violence that day. There he climbed atop other rioters to research the police line and wielded wooden poles and other objects to attempt to injure them.

Several of the officers who defended the Capitol that day sat in the front of the courtroom observing the proceedings, watching silently as prosecutors recounted Dempsey’s intense assaults. One officer who bore the brunt of Dempsey’s attack, Sgt. Jason Mastony, described the moment that Dempsey bashed his head with a crutch, cracking his face shield and causing a gash....

Prosecutors pressed Lamberth to impose a steep sentence in part because Jan. 6 was not an aberration for Dempsey. He has repeatedly gotten violent during protests and has used chemical sprays to disable counterprotesters. Prosecutors played a video of Dempsey using a skateboard to assault a protester at previous rallies, with some moments of violence prompting gasps in Lamberth’s courtroom....

Dempsey’s sentence landed with a particular impact on his family, who were present in the courtroom, including his 7-year-old daughter. After the sentencing, the young girl pranced in the hallway as her mother cried. A family member said the girl had just celebrated her birthday Thursday and isn’t “able to understand what’s going on.”

Only a handful of other Jan. 6 rioters without ties to extremist groups have faced sentences of 10 or more years. They include Peter Schwartz, who had a similarly long rap sheet and received a 14-year sentence; Daniel “D.J.” Rodriguez, who drove a taser into the neck of D.C. police officer Michael Fanone; and Thomas Webster, a retired NYPD officer who attempted to gouge the eyes of a D.C. police officer during a particularly vicious brawl.

A few posts reviewing Jan 6 sentencings from many prior related posts:

• Fascinating new AP accounting of all sentences given to January 6 rioters so far
• Politico provides new review of "Where Jan. 6 prosecutions stand, 18 months after the attack" 
• Reviewing latest data on Jan 6 riot prosecutions and sentencings
• A more detailed accounting of Jan 6 riot sentencings
• "The Relative Severity of Criminal Sentences in the January 6, 2021, Capitol Breach Cases"
• Latest accounting of Jan 6 prosecutions and sentences

"Truth in Sentencing, Incentives and Recidivism"

The title of this post is the title of this notable recent empirical paper authored by David Macdonald available via SSRN. (Hat tip to this recent episode of the podcast Probable Causation for highlighting the paper and bringing it to my attention.)   Here is its abstract:

Truth in Sentencing laws eliminate discretion in prison release.  This decreases the incentive for rehabilitative effort among prisoners.  I use a regression discontinuity design to exploit a change in these incentives created by the introduction of TIS in Arizona.  Before prison, I find that sentences were reduced by 20% for TIS offenders.  Further, I find that rule infractions increased by 22% to 55% and education enrolment fell by 24%.  After release, I find offenders were 4.8 p.p. more likely to reoffend.  I further find that recidivism and infractions effects are largest among drug and violent offenders.  Finally, I show that the reduction in sentences resulted in a broad equalization of time served at the cutoff, which indicates that the removal of early-release incentives by TIS was the main mechanism driving results.