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6TH CIRCUIT ISSUES REMARKABLE CRACK SENTENCE REDUCTION RULING

Everyone knows that a fox should not be delegated to guard the henhouse. But that’s because a fox knows what a chicken is (not to mention all of the delicious ways one may be prepared for dinner). But is it better when the fox, with all of a fox’s carnivorous ways, doesn’t have the first idea about the chickens he has been tasked to guard?

Back in 2006, Marty Smith pled guilty to a crack conspiracy involving more than 50 grams. Because Marty had a prior state drug conviction, he received a 240-month (that’s 20 years) mandatory minimum sentence, even though his Guidelines sentencing range would otherwise have been a still-substantial 168-210 months.

After the First Step Act passed, Marty applied for retroactive application of Congress’s 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which punished crack cocaine offenses much more closely to powder cocaine offenses.  Marty’s sentencing court, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, agreed that Marty was eligible for a reduction, and that under the FSA, his sentencing range was 77-96 months (and the statutory mandatory minimum fell to 120 months). But the sentencing judge hardly cared: he held that Marty’s original 20-year sentence “remained appropriate.”

“Appropriate” to whom? Certainly not to the 6th Circuit, which last week reversed Marty’s sentence. Noting that the sentence that the district court reimposed is now twice Marty’s maximum Guideline range and 250% the bottom of his range (excluding the statutory minimum), the Circuit held that that “the district court’s explanation for denying Smith’s motion for a reduction does not adequately explain why Smith should not receive at least some sentence reduction.”

The district court did little more than recall it had examined the 18 USC § 3553(a)(2) sentencing factors back in 2007, the Circuit said, and found Marty had a high risk for recidivism based on his significant criminal history. The 6th held that “these considerations are accounted for within-the-guidelines calculation and therefore do not provide sufficient justification for maintaining a sentence that is twice the maximum of the guideline range set by Congress… This is especially true when the district court previously found the at-guideline range sentence to be appropriate.”

It is true that Congress changed the Guidelines through the Fair Sentencing Act, the 6th said, but “the fact that Congress was the actor that reduced Smith’s guideline range through the passage of the First Step Act, rather than the Sentencing Commission, if anything increases rather than decreases the need to justify disagreement with the guideline.”

Ohio State University law professor Doug Berman wrote in his Sentencing Law and Policy blog that “the district judge in this matter is Danny C. Reeves, who just happens to be one of the two remaining active members of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. There is a particular irony in the Sixth Circuit panel needing to remind a member of the USSC about which ‘considerations are accounted for within the guidelines calculation and therefore do not provide sufficient justification for maintaining a sentence that is twice the maximum of the guideline range set by Congress’.”

The Sentencing Commission has been without a quorum since December 2018. Judge Reeves’ term expires on October 1, 2021. despite the fact that the Guidelines badly need revision (see the Commission’s obsolete policy on compassionate release, if you want an excellent example), perhaps there are worse things in the world than handing Judge Reeves a hammer for him to take to sentencing policy he may not completely understand.

United States v. Smith, Case No. 19-5281, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 15613 (6th Cir. May 15, 2020)

Sentencing Law and Policy, Sixth Circuit panel finds district judge gave insufficient justification for not reducing crack sentence after congressional reductions (May 16)

– Thomas L. Root