December 15, 2007 - WSWS.org (US)
US Supreme Court Rulings Give Judges More
Discretion in Sentencing
By John Burton
In
two rulings December 10, the Supreme Court gave federal judges
additional discretion in sentencing people convicted of federal
crimes by allowing them to deviate from the draconian US Sentencing
Guidelines. While the result is likely to shorten some prison
terms, the United States will no doubt continue to lead the world
in the percentage of its population incarcerated.
The most immediate beneficiaries of the
rulings are the people charged with or serving sentences for
offenses relating to the use, possession or sale of crack cocaine.
In Kimbrough v. United States the Supreme Court authorized
trial judges to disregard entirely the sentencing guidelines,
which treat one gram of crack cocaine as equal to 100 grams of
powder. This particular provision has been extensively criticized
for its racially disparate impact because crack defendants are
far more likely to be African-American users and low-level dealers,
while high-level traffickers more likely deal in powder.
In response to the ruling, the US Sentencing Commission voted Tuesday to
retroactively reduce crack cocaine sentences, potentially shortening
the terms of almost 20,000 prisoners -- 10 percent of all federal
inmates. It is expected that some 2,500 people will be freed
this March when the new cocaine guideline takes effect.
In the other case, Gall v. United States,
the defendant was prosecuted for trafficking in the drug ecstasy
while a second-year college student. He stopped selling and using
drugs three years before his arrest, however, and graduated from
the University of Iowa. He is presently employed as a master
carpenter in the construction trade.
The Supreme Court allowed the trial judge
to take into account the defendant's "self-rehabilitation"
and disregard the 30-month minimum prison term under the guidelines.
Instead, the judge sentenced him to three years probation.
The federal sentencing guidelines were
enacted during the 1980s as a result of right-wing "law-and-order"
demagoguery promoted by the Reagan administration and avidly
supported by Congressional Democrats. The guidelines, along with
stiffer sentencing in the state courts, caused the United States
prison population to skyrocket. The total number of inmates more
than doubled between 1990 and 2006, despite declining crime rates
tied to the general aging of the population and other demographic
factors.
Over the last 20 years, police and prosecutors
frequently chose federal courts for prosecuting drug crimes to
take advantage of the high mandatory sentencing guidelines. Several
federal judges resigned their lifetime appointments because of
the long sentences they were required to mete out. Others openly
criticized the guidelines as inhumane.
The Supreme Court softened the impact of
the guidelines three years ago in Booker v. United States,
a decision that has caused many lower courts to question the
extent to which the sentencing guidelines were advisory or mandatory.
This week's decisions appear to resolve the matter, making the
guidelines advisory only.
Both majority opinions were authored by
court moderates, with Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing
Kimbrough and Associate Justice John Paul Stevens writing
Gall. The reactionary four-justice bloc had a rare split,
with Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Antonin
Scalia joining the majority, while associate justices Clarence
Thomas and Joseph Alito dissented.
Although the two rulings suggest that federal
prison sentences will become shorter and the prison population
smaller, ironically during the three years following the Booker
decision the average federal criminal sentence actually increased.
The sentencing guidelines work both ways
-- the additional discretion now available to trial judges authorizes
them to hand out sentences longer than those authorized under
the guidelines. The fundamental injustice of overly long sentences
under federal criminal statutes remains in place.
By refusing to apply the constitutional
ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" to extremely
long sentences -- for example, the high court upheld a state
court sentence of life in prison for a theft committed by someone
with two prior felony convictions -- the Supreme Court sits atop
a criminal justice system which incarcerates about one out of
every 100 adults, and one in every nine black males between the
ages of 25 and 29.
With the advent of DNA testing, hundreds
of prisoners have been found innocent and freed. Studies have
revealed that most were convicted based on police and prosecutorial
misconduct, including coerced confessions, suggestive eyewitness
identifications, phony scientific evidence and the suppression
of exculpatory information.
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