We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

VIVA LA DIFFERENCE

Paul Manafort’s recent sentencing, a combined 90 months in prison, is a miscarriage of justice because it is too high or too low, depending on your political persuasion. But it has focused media attention on federal sentencing policy.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University has released a “study of judge sentencing differences at 155 federal courthouses across the country” in which “the judge with the lowest average prison sentence was compared with the judge with the highest average sentence at each courthouse.”

TRAC found that half of the 767 federal judges now on the bench serve at courthouses where the average prison sentence differed by at least 23 months depending upon which judge handled the case. Of these, 8.6% serve at six courthouses where the average prison sentence length handed down by judges varies according to judge by more than 48 months.

The biggest crapshoot in the system is Orlando in the Middle District of Florida. There, the difference between sentence imposed by the softest judge and the hardest judge is 80 months. Second place is the Greenbelt district court of the District of Maryland, with over 64 months difference among the seven judges serving there.

The TRAC study compares average sentences for each federal judge without controlling for the specific caseloads of these judges, and its authors warn that variations in average sentences could reflect caseload differences as much as judicial differences. But in the full report, TRAC notes that due to “the fairly large number of defendants sentenced by each judge, where there is random assignment of cases to judges then statistically speaking each judge should have closely comparable caseloads so that differences in the nature of the offenses and defendants’ histories are roughly comparable.”

The study has its limitations but Ohio State University law professor Doug Berman wrote in his Sentencing Policy & Log blog that, “still, it is interesting and useful to be reminded statistically of what all federal criminal justice practitioners know well, namely that most judges have their own distinctive and unique approaches to sentencing decision-making.” The study is undoubtedly an important tool for any defense attorney wanting to show sentence disparity.

Sentencing Law and Policy, Interesting new TRAC data on intra-courthouse judge-to-judge differences in sentences (Mar. 24, 2019)

TRAC, Seeing Justice Done: The Impact of the Judge on Sentencing (Mar. 22, 2019)

– Thomas L. Root