JUDGE DECLARES FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER NOT A DEITY
Steven Cavanaugh, a Nebraska state inmate, sued under the 1st Amendment and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act because officials wouldn’t let him wear pirate duds, worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), or take part in other Pastafarian pleasures. He said that the prison was violating his constitutional right to practice his religion.
Last month, U.S. District Judge John Gerrard (already in the news for his opposition to mandatory minimum sentences) denied Cavanaugh’s motion: “What drives the FSM’s devout followers, aka Pastafarians?” the Judge’s opinion asked. “Some say it’s the assuring touch from the FSM’s Noodly Appendage. There are those who love the worship service, which is conducted in Pirate-Speak and attended by congregants in dashing buccaneer garb. Still others are drawn to the Church’s flimsy moral standards, religious holidays every Friday, and the fact that Pastafarian Heaven is way cooler. Does your Heaven have a Stripper Factory and a Beer Volcano? Intelligent Design has finally met its match—and it has nothing to do with apes or the Olive Garden of Eden.”
But after examining the elements constituting religious beliefs, the Judge decided that Pastafarianism is not a religion, only a parody made to look like one. “This is not a question of theology,” the Court wrote. “It is a matter of basic reading comprehension… it is evident to the Court that FSMism is not a belief system addressing ‘deep and imponderable’ matters: it is… a satirical rejoinder to a certain strain of religious argument… Nor, however, does FSMism advocate for humanism or atheism… Those belief systems, although not theistic, still deal with issues of ‘ultimate concern’ and take a position ‘on religion, the existence and importance of a supreme being, and a code of ethics.’ FSMism takes no such position: the only position it takes is that others’ religious beliefs should not be presented as ‘science.’ Despite touching upon religion, that is a secular argument.”
White House Promises “All-Nighter” On Commutation Petitions
Playing the Percentages
Report Suggests BOP Saving $2 Billion From 2014 Guideline Reduction
Why You Should Have a Lawyer – Judge Convicted of Ordering Pro Se Defendant Stunned
Minnesota Towns Ban Sex Offenders in Wake of Federal Court Ruling
Because We Say So
Government Challenges EDNY Expungement of Conviction
Is the Bloom Off the Sentencing Reform Rose?
WHITE HOUSE PROMISES “ALL-NIGHTER” ON COMMUTATION PETITIONS
White House Counsel Neil Eggleston said last week he told his staff “no more eating, sleeping or drinking until we get all these commutations done,” in response to criticism that the Obama administration has done little to address a backlog of 9,000 clemency petitions.
Obama has commuted the sentences of 248 federal prisoners – mostly low-level drug defendants – including 61 at the end of March. The commutations have come in small batches, with last December’s 95 commutations the biggest to date. Last week, Eggleston said he believes the “infrastructure is now very much in place” to file and process clemency petitions.
So far, few federal prisoners have met the Administration’s strict criteria for clemency, which include serving at least 10 years in prison and high standards for nonviolence.
Eggleston said that most of the problems cited two months ago in a sharply-worded resignation letter by DOJ Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff have been addressed, and he rejected a recent New York Times editorial claim that the pardon process should be moved out of DOJ because federal prosecutors are trained to put people in jail, not get them out. “They’re quite committed to this,” Eggleston said.
RETROACTIVITY DATA SUGGESTS BOP SAVING $2 BILLION FROM 2014 2-LEVEL GUIDELINE REDUCTION
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s released a report last Friday finding that Amendment 782 – the Commission’s latest 2-level reduction for most drug offenses – has reduced sentences for 26,850 federal prisoners by an average of two years each.
Ohio State law professor Doug Berman estimated that Amendment 782 retroactivity is “on track to save federal taxpayers around $1.9 billion.” He argued last Friday in his sentencing blog that “as federal statutory sentencing reforms remained stalled in Congress and as Obama continues to be cautious in his use of his clemency power, this data provides still more evidence that the work of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in particular and of the federal judiciary in general remains the most continuously important and consequential force influencing federal prison populations and sentencing outcomes.”
Eladio Marroquin-Medina did what most drug defendants end up doing – he helped the government out, and got a 72-month sentence instead of the 87 to 108 months the Guidelines recommended.
Happily for Eladio, he later got a 2-level reduction under Guidelines Amendment 782. The district court recalculated his new advisory Guidelines range as 70 to 87 months, and then applied the same percentage reduction he had gotten for substantial assistance before, giving him a new sentence of 58 months.
Unhappily for Eladio, the district court did not apply his “level-based” approach. His original sentence had been reduced three Guidelines levels, and Eladio thought his new lower range should be reduced by three levels, too. This would have given him a sentence as low as 51 months. The district court refused, believing that it only had the authority to use a percentage-based approach under U.S.S.G. Sec. 1B1.10(b)(2)(B).
A week ago, the 11th Circuit ruled for Eladio. It held the Guidelines just grant a sentencing court the discretion to comparably reduce a defendant’s sentence where that defendant previously received a Sec. 5K1.1 departure at his original sentencing. “If a sentencing court chooses to exercise its discretion and make a comparable reduction,” the Court said, “it is not bound to use the percentage-based approach – or any one specific method – to calculate the comparable reduction. Rather, the court may use any of the reasonable methods that were available to calculate the original Sec. 5K1.1 departure, so long as they result in a comparable reduction.”
WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE A LAWYER – JUDGE CONVICTED OF ORDERING DEPUTY TO STUN PRO SE DEFENDANT
A former Maryland judge who ordered a sheriff’s deputy to set off a defendant’s “stun-cuff” ankle device was sentenced last week to anger-management classes a $5,000 fine.
Judge Robert C. Nalley will also spend a year on probation. Nalley pleaded guilty earlier this year to a civil rights violation for ordering a deputy to activate the “stun-cuff.” that a defendant appearing before him was wearing around his ankle. The defendant, who was acting as his own lawyer, was before Nalley in July 2014 for jury selection and had failed stop speaking when the Judge ordered him to do so.
After he was shocked, the defendant fell to the ground screaming. Prosecutor Kristi O’Malley noted that the defendant remained courteous at all times, but the Judge “very quickly grew impatient,” and that his use of the stun-cuff was “highly disproportionate” for “nothing more than verbal interruptions.”
Nalley, who was a judge in Charles County from 1988 to September 2014, did not apologize in court but did say he had made an “error in judgment.”
MINNESOTA TOWNS BAN SEX OFFENDERS IN WAKE OF FEDERAL COURT RULING
Minnesota has seen a dramatic rise in municipal laws restricting where sex offenders can live after they have served their terms, setting up a fight at the State Capitol. Some state legislators want to give local communities more control to enact new restrictions, as communities brace for the release of more sex offenders from forced civil commitment in response to a federal ruling that declared the state’s program unconstitutional.
In Karsjens v. Jesson, Judge Donovan Frank ruled last year that the Minnesota Sex Offender Program is essentially permanent confinement with no clear path to release.
A group of legislators has proposed a measure allowing cities and counties to enact tougher laws to keep Level 3 sex offenders — considered the most likely to reoffend — away from schools, parks and other places frequented by children. The chief sponsor says he hopes the bill will give the towns stronger legal standing to defend their sex-offender ordinances in court.
The request was unremarkable. An inmate wanted a copy of his plea agreement unsealed. The district court refused, citing its universal policy to make such agreements available only to the parties, explaining cryptically that “the Court has reasons to do what it’s done.”
Ten days ago, the 6th Circuit reversed. Noting that “plea agreements play a central role in our criminal justice system… What has been said of the plea bargaining process can also be said of the plea agreement itself: It is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.” The Court argued public access to plea agreements “plays a significant role in monitoring the administration of justice by plea.” That makes plea agreements “the quintessential judicial record, entitled to the protection of the First Amendment.”
The Court of Appeals said plea agreements may be sealed “only by an overriding interest based on findings that closure is essential to preserve higher values and is narrowly tailored to serve that interest.” The district court’s saying only that “it has its reasons” did not offer “findings specific enough that a reviewing court can determine whether the closure order was properly entered… The district court’s ruling, based on a blanket policy, does not satisfy either the constitutional or common law standards.”
GOVERNMENT CHALLENGES EDNY EXPUNGEMENT OF CONVICTION
Federal prosecutors last week urged the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn an E.D.N.Y. district judge’s expungement of an unemployed woman’s decade-old conviction, while her attorneys argued it would be a mistake for the court to depart from existing case law.
Last summer, Judge John Gleeson expunged the conviction of a defendant known in the pleadings as Jane Doe, who had been unable to get a job in the wake her sentence for playing a minor role in an insurance fraud 10 years before.
During oral argument, Circuit judges put both sides to the test with questions on when a judge’s jurisdiction ceased, the difference between arrest and conviction records, and whether Jane Doe had adequate remedies through state laws forbidding job discrimination based on one’s criminal history.
There is no general federal statute for expungement, but a 1977 2nd Circuit ruling – United States v. Schnitzer – said expungement power is within a judge’s “equitable discretion.” Schnitzer held it should only be granted in “extreme circumstances.” Gleeson said Doe, with no subsequent criminal history and a repeatedly unsuccessful effort to get work, fit the definition.
Judge Gleeson, now in private practice, held the public was better served if Doe was a working member of society than if her conviction was a matter of public record. He wrote he had sentenced Doe “to five years of probation supervision, not to a lifetime of unemployment.”
Things are not looking rosy for the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, before the Senate as S. 2123, and before the House as H.R. 3713. The Marshall Report said last Friday that “there is a growing sense that a) Congress is unlikely to pass anything this year worthy of being called reform, and b) it might be better to start over in 2017.” Many criminal justice reform advocates – and more than a few inmates – have heard that refrain before.
The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 was predicted to be a defining issue of this Congress, a rare unifying moment for Republicans, Democrats and the President. Instead, the members of the Judiciary Committee who wrote the criminal justice package are now at war over whether to consider Mr. Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick B. Garland.
The New York Times reported last Thursday that the feud over the nomination has overshadowed the effort to pass sentence reform. Supporters of reform are worried about the bill’s fate, especially with the Senate about to turn to time-consuming spending bills, and with the election-year calendar approaching a point where only the most essential work gets done.
“If this is going to happen along with 12 appropriations bills, we are going to have to elbow our way into the queue,” Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois), one of the bill’s authors, said. “The ball is now on the Republican side of the net.”
The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported last week that Administration officials are “quite optimistic” that the Senate will act on a criminal justice overhaul bill “quite soon,” according to White House Counsel Neil Eggleston. But Senate leaders who have been working closely with White House officials, sounded more cautious. “It doesn’t seem to be moving,” said Judiciary member Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) admitted. “We’ve got to get agreement on some things so it doesn’t take much time,” he said.
Meanwhile, criminal justice issues are generating some heat for the Democrat front-runner. Former President Bill Clinton spent more than 10 minutes last Thursday confronting protesters at one of his wife’s campaign rallies in Philadelphia over criticisms that a 1994 crime bill he approved while president led to a surge in the imprisonment of black people.
The former President gave as good as he got. Clinton said the bill lowered the country’s crime rate, which benefited African-Americans, achieved bipartisan support, and diversified the police force. He told one protester, “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children … Maybe you thought they were good citizens … You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.”
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
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Dog Bites Man: DOJ says BOP Medical Care Not “Adequate”
Politics and Sentence Reform
HANDS OFF MY MONEY!
Sila Luis was accused of swindling the Government in a $45 million health care scam. She intended to hire a lawyer with her own money – cash she had legitimately earned outside of the alleged fraud – but the government convinced a court to freeze all of her assets (not just the money it said she had stolen), because if she was convicted, Luis would need her legit cash to pay restitution.
The government commonly gets courts to issue pre-trial freezes on assets it says were earned from crime. The theory is that those ill-gotten sums never really belonged to a defendant to begin with. But the Luis asset freeze was different – everything she owned (legal or not) was seized.
Luis argued that freezing her lawfully earned assets denied her 6th Amendment right to hire the attorney of her choice. Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) agreed, putting a stop to the government’s overreach.
The justices said that the difference between the usual pretrial asset freeze and Luis’s case “consists of the fact that the property here is untainted; i.e., it belongs to the defendant, pure and simple. In this respect it differs from a robber’s loot, a drug seller’s cocaine, a burglar’s tools, or other property associated with the planning, implementing, or concealing of a crime. The Government may well be able to freeze, perhaps to seize, assets of the latter, “tainted” kind before trial. As a matter of property law the defendant’s ownership interest is imperfect. The robber’s loot belongs to the victim, not to the defendant … The property at issue here, however, is not loot, contraband, or otherwise “tainted.” It belongs to the defendant.”
The opinion included a troubling observation for federal defendants who are not sitting on a pile of legal cash. It suggested that if the government’s position was upheld, innocent defendants could be stripped of everything before trial, and “would fall back upon … overworked and underpaid public defenders … Only 27 percent of county-based public defender offices have sufficient attorneys to meet nationally recommended caseload standards. And as one amicus points out, ‘[m]any federal public defender organizations and lawyers appointed under the Criminal Justice Act serve numerous clients and have only limited resources’.”
“The upshot,” the opinion concluded, “is a substantial risk that accepting the Government’s views would – by increasing the government-paid-defender workload – render less effective the basic right the Sixth Amendment seeks to protect.”
So the Supreme Court acknowledged that throwing Luis and others like her to the public-defender system would weaken their 6th Amendment rights to effective counsel. But what does that say about the constitutional rights of the vast majority of federal defendants who had no other choice?
A new federal law requiring the State Department to mark the passports of certain convicted sex offenders faced its first test in federal court on Wednesday.
A group of convicted sex offenders has asked a federal district court in Oakland, California, to block enforcement of the law pending the outcome of a February lawsuit they filed that challenges the law’s constitutionality. The Inter-national Megan’s Law to Prevent Demand for Child Sex Trafficking requires the State Department to add a “unique identifier” to passports of Americans con-victed of sex crimes involving minors, and directs U.S. officials to alert other governments when those Americans travel abroad.
“For the first time in the history of this nation,” the lawsuit alleges, “the United States Government will publicly stigmatize a disfavored minority group using a document foundational to citizenship.” The plaintiffs argue the law violates the First Amendment by forcing people convicted of sex offenses to bear the equivalent of a “Scarlet Letter” on their passports.
During the hearing, U.S. District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton seemed skeptical of the challengers’ arguments that marking the passports would expose travelers to the risk of physical harm and imply that the holders had engaged in child sex trafficking or child sex tourism. “I’m not sure how you make that leap, that that’s what the message is,” the judge said. “Where does that come from?”
The plaintiffs want the judge to grant an injunction against enforcing the law while the lawsuit goes forward. The DOJ argues that an injunction is premature, because rules to implement the new law have not yet been written.
Whether the holding in Johnson v. United States will benefit the thousands of people doing extra time under the Armed Career Criminal Act or Guidelines “career offender” designations lurched closer to a decision last week, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Welch v. United States.
The whole question may seem confusing. Petitioner Welch thinks Johnson should retroactively apply to him. So does the government. But nothing is simple for SCOTUS. The underlying issue is important enough to be fairly argued, so the Court appointed an attorney to play devil’s advocate, and contend that Johnson should not be retroactive because it’s holding was purely procedural, not substantive.
Afterwards, one commentator suggested that the oral argument presaged a “likely decision in favor of retroactivity,” a view that Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) immediately trumpeted to inmates in an email. The court observer, law professor Rory Little, wrote for the website SCOTUSBlog (which is the “go-to” source for Supreme Court information on the Web) that “while it is not possible to describe the intricacies of retroactivity doctrine here — let alone wise if we want to keep our readers awake — it looks like last Term’s decision in Johnson v. United States will be declared to apply retroactively for all purposes, including on first and even successive (assuming they are timely filed) habeas corpus petitions.”
It’s a fool’s errand to try to read how the Court is going to rule based on what is said at oral argument. And the intricacies of the retroactivity doctrine – whether a change in the law is procedural or substantive – first articulated a generation ago in Teague v. Lane are Gordian. Law prof Douglas Berman wrote in his sentencing blog last Thursday that “the Welch oral argument leaves me concerned that the current Justices are going to be content to apply existing Teague doctrines in a quirky manner to a quirky case …”
Nevertheless, the Justices expressed amazement that anyone could see Johnson as a merely procedural decision. Justice Ginsburg asked “how can it not be substantive when, under one rule, the sentence range goes minimum of 15 years up to life, and the other reading, it’s zero to ten years? I can’t imagine anything more substantive than five extra – a minimum of five extra years in prison.” And Justice Breyer said, “I thought the point of Teague was that if the statute under which they are convicted doesn’t exist anymore because … it was an unconstitutional statute they are serving time under a statute which was then and is now nonexistent and, therefore, they get out.”
Prof. Little wrote that “the decision in this case is likely to be simply one more precedent in the wavering doctrinal line … But convicted federal felons whose sentences are reduced by five or more years will not care about the intricacies, while young law professors aspiring to tenure will have new grist for their mills.”
A decision in Welch – which will probably be favorable to retroactivity – should be released by the end of June.
Back in 2009, mariner José Luis Casiano-Jiménez thought things were breaking his way. He had signed on a merchant ship in a South American port as an “able-bodied seaman,” sort of a maritime worker bee. Before the voyage had progressed much, he was promoted to first officer due to an unexpected need for a replacement. This is sort of like hiring on at the bank as an assistant teller, and the next day becoming vice president.
Things didn’t stay rosy, however, when the ship arrived in Puerto Rico, and everyone on board was arrested for importation of drugs. At the trial, the seamen were acquitted, but the jury wasn’t so kind to the ships’ officers. During the trial, the defendants met in a group with their lawyers, where the attorneys “explained to them . . . that it would not be advisable for any of them to take the stand” and that the lawyers had collectively agreed that a single expert would present the rudiments of a “lack of knowledge” defense on behalf of all the defendants.
José, of course, was among the convicted. After he lost his appeal, he filed a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, in which he claimed that his lawyer had not advised him of his right to testify in his own behalf. The trial court threw the motion out as “inherently incredible,” despite the fact that José’s attorney backed up his client as to what had happened.
Last week, the 1st Circuit reversed. Holding that “there must be a focused discussion between lawyer and client” about the defendant’s right to testify, and “that discussion must — at a bare minimum — enable the defendant to make an informed decision about whether to take the stand.” Here, the Court of Appeals said, “the assembled defense lawyers told the assembled defendants that the lawyers ‘thought an expert would be the best way . . . to testify on all their behalf’ and explained to them that ‘it was a consensus . . . it would not be advisable for any of [the defendants] to take the stand’. But that consensus was a consensus only among the lawyers. During the meeting, no one told the petitioner, in words or substance, that he had a right to testify; and no one bothered to obtain his informed consent to remaining silent … The most that can be said is that the defense lawyers unilaterally decided that none of the defendants would testify and presented that decision to the defendants as a fait accompli.”
The 1st Circuit found that the error had prejudiced José, because the evidence was so close that “his testimony could have been a game-changer.” Noting that a defendant’s testimony as to non-involvement should not be disregarded lightly, the Court noted that he had never sailed with the crew before, never sailed on that ship before, and had signed on only as a seaman. “These facts would have bolstered the petitioner’s claim that he was unaware of the presence of any contraband on the ship,” the Court held. “Given this tableau, prejudice is obvious.”
In journalism, a “dog bites man” story is one that is not news at all, something that’s so commonplace that everyone knows it already. So it is with last week’s report from the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, revealing that the BOP suffers from consistently understaffed health facilities, and mismanages the health services staff it does have, resulting in medical care for inmates that is inadequate.
The OIG’s conclusions won’t come as a surprise to inmates. The report found that lousy pay and benefits leaves the BOP unable to hire enough medical professionals. As a result, persistent health staffing shortages have left some BOP institutions with staff vacancy rates of 40% or higher.
A former BOP official told auditors that medical staffing vacancies have reached a “crisis level” at some institutions. “Although BOP policy states that the vacancy rate shall not exceed 10 percent during any 18-month period, we found that only 24 of 97 BOP institutions had a medical staffing rate of 90 percent or higher as of September 2014,” the review found. Making matters worse, the OIG said, the BOP does not competently manage the staff it has or tried to address the personnel shortage in a coordinated, strategic way.
Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) remained in Kentucky last week, but sentencing reform followed him there. Last Tuesday, Kentucky sentence reform advocates held a rally outside McConnell’s Lexington office to demand that he bring S. 2123 to a vote.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) recently promised to bring H.R. 3713 up for a vote, but McConnell has not made the same commitment. The advocates delivered a Drug Policy Alliance petition signed by over 30,000 people, calling for McConnell to schedule a vote on the bill.
Meanwhile, last Monday, the National Urban League – a civil rights organization that advocates on behalf of African Americans against racial discrimination – delivered a surprising and striking rebuke to sentence reform legislation. In a detailed letter delivered to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, National Urban League President Marc Morial demanded that Congress delay action on the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 until the Sentencing Commission delivers detailed data on the impacts S. 2123 and H.R 3713 would have on Blacks and Hispanics before giving support.
Ironically, this setback for sentencing reform – coming as it does from a strange source – occurred even as MSR Online, a Minnesota-based African American news service, complained on Thursday that sentencing reform legislation had become bogged down in politics.
As we reported, President Obama granted commutation to 61 more federal prisoners last Wednesday. Some observers noted he was acting even “as sentencing reform stalls.”
Despite the cheerleading led by the White House press office, some commentators aren’t giving the President chops for the commutations. Mark Osler, a law professor and former federal prosecutor, said in the New York Times last Friday that with 9,000 petitions still pending, the Administration has nothing to crow about. “The problem here is that too many cases can’t be adequately considered by the president because of a sluggish and often intransigent review process. Clemency petitions undergo no fewer than seven levels of review, four of them within the Department of Justice. Within the Justice Department, clemency petitions run not only through the Office of the Pardon Attorney but also through the office of the deputy attorney general. When the pardon attorney, Deborah Leff, resigned in January, she complained in her letter of resignation that meritorious clemency cases had been thwarted by those above her. She noted in particular that some of her own recommendations had been overruled by the deputy attorney general, Sally Quillian Yates.”
Osler noted that the process includes the opinion of the federal prosecutors who brought the case in the first place. “But prosecutors are the wrong people for the task of vetting clemency cases. I was a federal prosecutor for five years … The prospect of being wrong — and a clemency initiative like Mr. Obama’s can feel like a judgment that prosecutors were wrong — can be a lot to bear. We should not be surprised if, when it comes to Mr. Obama’s clemency initiative, prosecutors systematically resist what is, in effect, an indictment of their work.”
Osler suggested that the DOJ Pardon Attorney be put at the top of the clemency process instead of the bottom, and report directly to the president. “That would allow an independent but thorough review of clemency petitions free from the influence of career prosecutors.”
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
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President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 61 prisoners today (Wednesday, March 30, 2016), as a continuation of an effort to more aggressively use the commutation power, particularly as it relates to low-level drug offenders.
The names of the prisoners receiving commutations have not yet been released.
“Despite the progress we have made, it is important to remember that clemency is nearly always a tool of last resort that can help specific individuals, but does nothing to make our criminal justice system on the whole more fair and just,” White House counsel Neil Eggleston wrote in a blog post that went online Wednesday morning.
“Clemency of individual cases alone cannot fix decades of overly punitive sentencing policies. So while we continue to work to resolve as many clemency applications as possible — and make no mistake, we are working hard at this — only broader criminal justice reform can truly bring justice to the many thousands of people behind bars serving unduly harsh and outdated sentences,” Eggleston wrote.
The announcement was intended to blunt a rash of criticism over the past week about the failure of the Administration’s pardon process to live up to its hype.
248 commutations – a drop in the bucket, and this guy’s time is almost up …
When the Dept. of Justice’s new acting pardon attorney, former AUSA Robert Zauzmer, took office last month, he found a backlog of over 9,000 clemency petitions awaiting initial processing. Most were the byproduct of Clemency Project 2014, established with great fanfare by DOJ to process additional applications from federal prisoners seeking reductions of unjustifiably long drug sentences.
The Washington Post reported January 19th that his predecessor, Deborah Leff, quit over frustrations with a lack of resources. In her resignation letter, just obtained yesterday by USA Today under a Freedom of Information Act request, Leff accused the Obama administration of telling DOJ attorneys to neglect applications for presidential pardons to give priority to the Justice Department’s initiative to release low-level offenders from prison.
Leff’s resignation letter suggested a broken bureaucratic process at odds with Obama’s announced aim of exercising his pardon power “more aggressively” in the final months of his presidency. She wrote that the administration’s focus on the clemency initiative at the expense of traditional pardons and commutations “means that the requests of thousands of petitioners seeking justice will lie unheard.”
Some commentators in the Washington Post last Friday wondered whether Obama was ever serious about Clemency 2014. The rules for commutation requests that even make it to the overburdened pardons office are inexcusably discouraging. The worst is that inmates must have served at least 10 years of their sentence. Other rules hold that they must not have “a significant criminal history,” they must be nonviolent, low-level offenders, and they must be serving a sentence harsher than they would have gotten if convicted of the same offense today. Those who fall “outside of this initiative,” according to DOJ, can still seek clemency under the old rules if their applications are “especially meritorious.”
Because of this, the Washington Post reported last week, Obama’s clemency record makes him one of the least merciful presidents in history. He has granted just 70 pardons – the lowest number of any full-term president since John Adams – and 187 commutations of sentence (248 with today’s announcement). The White House website today was trumpeting that Obama has issued more commutations than the last six presidents combined. However, it fails to mention that the number of pardons issued is a low not equaled since the 1790s.
Meanwhile, over 1,600 pardon petitions have been denied (more than five of the previous six presidents), as well as more than 8,000 commutation requests (a new record). An additional 3,400 requests have been “closed without presidential action.”
Obama’s record is all the more questionable because he has promised more while delivering less than any president in history. In 2014, then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. encouraged federal prisoners to seek relief, saying there were “still too many people . . . sentenced under the old regime” needing commutation. Holder said the White House had “indicated” that it wanted to “consider additional clemency applications to restore a degree of justice, fairness, and proportionality for deserving individuals who do not pose a threat to public safety.”
However, the Post reported last week, Clemency Project 2014 has become a bureaucratic disaster, assigned to volunteer lawyers and law students with little experience in dealing with the federal criminal justice system.
The White House has announced that it will host a briefing titled Life After Clemency with advocates, academics, and Administration officials to discuss ideas on the President’s clemency initiative and ways to improve paths to reentry. In addition to officials from the White House and the Department of Justice, experts, academics, and commutation recipients will share their expertise and insights on returning to society after years behind bars.
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
If you have a question, contact us using our handy contact page. We don’t charge for initial consultation.
The Kentucky Two-Step FOIA Information Isn’t Any Freer Than You Are Ninth Circuit Judge Calls Out Prosecutors 2255 Prejudice Comes Cheap In The 5th Circuit Legal Briefs – Me and My Big Mouth Try to Save Me Money? Take That! You’re Not Guilty Enough Sentence Reform Lays an (Easter) Egg
DANCING THE KENTUCKY TWO-STEP
The Speedy Trial Act requires that a defendant be brought to trial within 70 days of indictment (subject to a lot of exceptions and exclusions). But what’s a court to do when there are no exclusions left, and the 70 days are up?
The 6th Circuit last week told an Eastern District of Kentucky court what it could not do. Jason Brown was a defendant with a definite idea about his rights under the STA. When the deadline loomed, but the attorneys had conflicts and a witness was not available for a couple of weeks, he refused to go along with a continuance. So the judge started the trial, picked a jury, and then recessed for a few weeks until everyone’s schedule was clear.
Problem solved? Jason didn’t think so, and the Circuit agreed. In a lengthy opinion, the Court concluded that the “trial did not commence on September 8, despite the commencement of voir dire, because the court employed the start-and-stop plan with the intent to pay lip service to the Act.” The appeals panel concluded that none of the days after September 8 were excludable from the STA, and thus Jason’s rights were violated.
The 6th Circuit noted in passing that the district court seemed to believe that Brown had to show “prejudice” to prevail on his STAclaim. The Court rejected that, holding that the STA “guarantee is violated if the prosecution oversteps the time limits of the act. Under the Speedy Trial Act there is no need to measure prejudice to the defendant.”
United States v. Brown, Case No. 14-6543/6544 (6th Cir. Mar 24, 2016) FOIA INFORMATION ISN’T ANY FREER THAN YOU ARE
It’s common for inmates to file requests under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain files relating to their cases. It’s almost as common to wait for years before hearing from the FBI, DEA or some other agency that hardly any documents (or no documents at all) exist.
If it seems that agencies are worse than ever in turning over records, there’s a reason: the Associated Press reported last week that during the Obama years, the government set a record for the number of times it told requesters that despite searching, it couldn’t find a single page requested under the FOIA.
In more than one in six cases – about 130,000 times last year – government workers said they came up empty-handed. In fact, people who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77% of requests, also a record.
The FBI couldn’t find any records in 39% of cases. U.S. Customs and Border Protection couldn’t find anything in 34% of cases. Skepticism over such results has led some requesters to specify exactly how they want federal employees to search for files, rather than relying on government staff to figure out how best to proceed. “They do really crappy searches,” said Washington lawyer Kel McClanahan, who handles transparency and national security cases.
Last summer, Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit wrote a thoughtful law journal article called Criminal Law 2.0. In it, he listed 12 reasons to be concerned about the criminal justice system, including prosecutors withholding evidence from the defense in violation of Brady v. Maryland.
One of Judge Kozinski’s suggestions for ensuring Brady compliance was to name names: “When prosecutors misbehave, don’t keep it a secret. Defense lawyers who are found to have been ineffective regularly find their names plastered into judicial opinions, yet judges seem strangely reluctant to name names when it comes to misbehaving prosecutors.”
Last week, Judge Kozinski did just that. In Frost v. Gilbert, a decision on a Washington state habeas corpus, the 9th Circuit held that prosecutors had withheld evidence of a plea deal the prosecution had secretly given a witness in exchange for testifying, and then lied to the prisoner in answer to a public records request. The court held, however, that the prisoner had not been prejudiced, because – even if he had known about the secret deal – there was no reasonable probability that he would have been acquitted.
Five of the 11 Circuit judges essentially told the prosecutors – who were identified in the opinion– to report themselves to the state bar: “We have been apprised of no sanctions against these individuals, nor any inquiry conducted by the courts. Nor have we heard of any effort to hold [the witness] accountable for the perjury he almost certainly committed in his testimony in Frost’s case or to determine the degree to which he may have been aided in that endeavor by prosecuting attorney Wagnild. We are mindful that there may be circumstances of which we are unaware that cast the matter in a different light. Yet … we do not believe this is a sufficient reason to keep silent. The individuals we have named may wish to furnish a copy of this opinion to the state bar and seek to clear their names by providing an explanation for its consideration.”
Four of the en banc judges accused Judge Kozinski of using the decision as a “platform to offer the author’s ‘two-cents’ on the supposed inner-workings of Washington’s criminal justice system. Along the way, the character and integrity of several public employees is tarnished.”
Kozinski, Alex, Criminal Law 2.0, 44 Geo.L.J. Ann.Rev.Crim.Proc. (2015)
Frost v. Gilbert, Case No. 11-35114 (9th Cir. Mar 21, 2016) 2255 PREJUDICE COMES CHEAP IN THE 5TH CIRCUIT
Fletcher Freeman was charged with a drug conspiracy and possession. Later, the government piled on a third count for possession in a superseding indictment. He was convicted in due course.
Fletch filed a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, claiming that the possession count was barred by the statute of limitations. He argued his lawyer was ineffective in failing to argue that the third count was filed past the 5-year cutoff.
Most 2255 ineffective assistance of counsel claims fail, not because lawyers don’t blunder (they often do), but because inmates can’t show that if that the mistake hadn’t happened, it’s reasonably probable they would have ended up better off. That’s what happened to Fletch in the district court: the government admitted the possession count was barred by the statute of limitations, but said Fletcher would gotten the same sentence even without it.
Last week, the 5th Circuit reversed. It held that “Freeman’s counsel was deficient … Counsel was required to perform research on whether the superseding indictment would relate back to the original indictment.” More important for Fletcher Freeman, the Circuit held that “the ‘prejudice prong’ is also supported by the record. Freeman had to pay a $100 special assessment on count three; thus, he suffered prejudice as a result of counsel’s failure to move to dismiss said count.”
So a hundred bucks will buy you prejudice. There are few better bargains in life.
When Jorge Sanchez was being booked after his arrest on trafficking charges, the police booking asked the not-yet-Mirandized defendant the usual questions about his name, date of birth, height, weight, and so on. When asked for his current employment, Sanchez matter-of-factly answered that he was “a drug dealer.”
Not a good answer. Last week, the 1st Circuit told the abashed Sanchez that normal booking questions do not constitute an interrogation, and that it would not suppress his wise-ass response.
Prison phone companies told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last week that enforcement of new Federal Communications Commission-ordered lower rates for in-state calls will cause “jail unrest.”
The phone companies want the Court to stay the FCC order. The vendors say the court should mostly preserve the status quo, while the FCC argues that the order lets it apply its existing caps on interstate call rates to intrastate calls.
A phone company executive said in an affidavit that if the new order is enforced, “inmates will be angry if they believe that we are charging the wrong rates. There could be damage to our phones and equipment, as well as a threat to overall security and corrections personnel including inmates within the facilities. Having been in this industry for eight years, I have experience with jail unrest and I know that issues with the phones can trigger it.”
“I admit I was in a conspiracy with other people to, uhm — with 50 grams or more of meth, to have bought it,” Lloyd Nickle told the district court. The judge, however, wanted more, telling him to “admit enough information for me to make a reasonable decision about your drug activity.” But Nickle added only that other conspiracies were not in Montana, but “in other states.” The district refused to “accept a plea from this man under these circumstances,” and made him go to trial.
Last week, the 9th Circuit reversed. It said “there is no requirement in Rule 11(b) that the defendant himself give an in-depth account of his crime or confirm that everything in the government’s offer of proof is true. Although Nickle claimed ‘some of the things that the witnesses say [in the government’s offer of proof] are untrue,’ he never suggested that the government did not have sufficient evidence for a jury to conclude that he is guilty. Armed with the defendant’s admission of guilt and the government’s offer of proof, the district court had all it needed to fulfill its duty underRule 11(b)(3).”
The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 – before the Senate as S. 2123, and before the House as H.R. 3713 –is nowhere near hatching. All that happened last week was that H.R. 3713 picked up yet two more cosponsors, both Democrats from New York. The Senate bill still has 28 cosponsors, while H.R. 3713 now has 63.
Mostly, legislators were home for Easter week. Back in Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told students at Northern Kentucky University that S. 2123 is supported by a majority of Democrats, but Republicans are divided on the issue. “The reason it’s kind of divided is that you’ve got an awful lot of people in the law enforcement community that are not really convinced that having lighter sentences is a good idea,” McConnell said. “They oppose federal sentencing reform because “there aren’t any casual users in the federal prison, these are all the bad guys.”
And how about those “bad guys?” The Justice Department last week released statistics – which showed federal prosecutors pursued fewer but more serious drug cases – as evidence that Obama’s criminal justice reforms are bearing fruit. “Federal prosecutors are consistently using their discretion to focus our federal resources on the most serious cases and to ensure that we reserve harsh mandatory minimum sentence for the most dangerous offenders,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said.
New statistics show federal drug prosecutions down 6% in 2015 after a prior 14% drop since the beginning of former Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Smart on Crime” initiative. Since 2012, the number of federal drug defendants accused of using a weapon rose from 15% to 17% and the number with a leadership role went from 6.6% to 7.8%.
In a speech last Wednesday to Congressional interns, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) said that criminal justice policies embraced by Congress in the 1990s have “end[ed] up ruining [defendants’] lives and hurting their communities where we could’ve have alternative means of incarceration, instead of basically destroying someone’s life. I’ve become a late convert.”
Business Insider reported that Ryan said, “Criminal-justice reform is something I never thought of when I was younger. Be tough on crime, be tough on crime.” Ryan said criminal-justice reform bills would be brought to the House floor soon, and he pledged to “advance” them. “I didn’t necessarily know this before, but redemption is a beautiful thing. It’s a great thing. Redemption is what makes this place work. We need to honor redemption. We need to make redemption something that is valued in our culture and our society and in our laws.”
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
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Public Defender Calls For Post-Conviction Right To Counsel
Stop Me Before I Rob Again
No Friend Of Mine
Nothing Happening On Sentence Reform
MORE CLEMENCY GRANTS RUMORED
President Obama is expected to grant clemency to another group of federal prisoners in the coming weeks, part of his effort to provide relief to federal inmates sentenced to harsh sentences for drug offenses.
When Obama first announced his clemency initiative in 2014, the Department of Justice asked private attorneys for help in locating candidates for commutation. At that time, DOJ was already sitting on thousands of applications. Two years later, 9,000 petitions are pending at DOJ, and another 9,000 still await review by the lawyers who volunteered to help review applicants. So far the organization, known as Clemency Project 2014, has been contacted by 34,000 prisoners, but has forwarded petitions from only 300 or so. Only 31 have received commutations.
The raw number of commutations granted by Obama – 187 – looks impressive, but it represents less than 1% of the petitions he has received, compared to almost 7% for Richard Nixon, 4% for Gerald Ford, and almost 3% for Jimmy Carter. In 2014 the Obama administration envisioned granting thousands of commutations by the end of 2016. After a very slow start in his first term, Obama did pick up the pace, but not nearly enough to hit that target.
The DOJ blames the Clemency Project, and says the group should hand over the outstanding cases without further vetting. Cynthia Roseberry, project manager at the lawyers’ network, denies foot dragging. One reason the Clemency Project has been moving so slowly is to be sure applicants meet the DOJ’s “excessively picky criteria,” which include whether a prisoner would have received a shorter sentence under current law, whether he has a significant criminal history, whether he has good conduct in prison, and whether he has significant gang ties.”
Calvin Davis made a few mistakes. First, he joined a heroin conspiracy. Second, he didn’t pick his buyers carefully, one of whom turned out to be a confidential informant. Third – and most important – he made a lousy plea deal.
Last week, he learned why economist Thomas Sowell warns that “you will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
Cal’s plea deal provided he would be sentenced to 66% of either the low end of the Guidelines sentencing range or the statutory minimum term, whichever was higher. He expected an 80-month prison term. But the Guidelines range figured by the probation officer came out much higher than the parties had expected. The court ordered Davis to serve 172 months, a term that was 66% of the low end of the Guidelines range (consistent with the plea agreement) but more than twice what the parties anticipated when they made the plea deal.
Cal didn’t appeal or file a timely motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. But after the Supreme Court’s decision in Alleyne v. United States, Davis filed a § 2255 motion contending that he was entitled to relief because the judge’s sentencing findings regarding his criminal history had increased the minimum term of imprisonment. Alleyne held that any factual determination increasing a defendant’s statutory mandatory minimum term (in that case, the fact that a defendant “brandished” a gun instead of just “possessing” it) must be charged in the indictment and proven beyond reasonable doubt to the factfinder.
The district court held Davis had no Alleyne claim because the Supreme Court has not declared that decision applicable retroactively on collateral review. Last week, the 7th Circuit agreed.
The appellate judges were puzzled as to why Davis thought Alleyne helped him at all. He was subject to a 10-year statutory minimum based on the amount of drugs involved in the trafficking conspiracy – an amount charged in the indictment and to which he admitted. What’s more, criminal history findings like the ones that subjected Calvin to higher guidelines are exempt from the Apprendi v. New Jersey precedents entitling a defendant to a formal charge and a trial on facts that expose him to harsher penalties. But “the clearest impediment to the Alleyne claim” was “that the Supreme Court has not held that Alleyne applies retroactively to cases on collateral review.”
Only the Supreme Court has authority to declare Alleyneretroactive, the 11th Circuit said, and unless it does, no one can claim the benefit of Alleyne in a § 2255 motion. The Supreme Court has not declared Alleyne to be retroactive, so the case’s constitutional teachings are not available to anyone unlucky enough to be improperly sentenced before it was decided.
PUBLIC DEFENDER CALLS FOR POST-CONVICTION RIGHT TO COUNSEL
In a column coinciding with last Friday’s 53rd anniversary of Gideon v. Wainright, a New York public defender official called for establishment of a post-conviction right of counsel.
Under current law, prisoners are seldom entitled to a lawyer for habeas corpus actions like § 2255 motions or suits challenging prison conditions. Ken Strutin, director of legal information services at the New York State Defenders Association, argued that the right to counsel has not kept pace with overcriminalization and mass incarceration.
Strutin contended that “for the pro se, ‘access to the courts’ has been whittled down to filling out forms and rummaging through libraries inadequate to their purpose … There is no equality of lawyering between the state and the imprisoned. The information world is cruelly biased in favor of the free and the Internet ready. Government lawyers can cite materials in their briefs found easily online or on the other side of publisher paywalls. They have access to the most current resources, information archives and litigation support. How do ill-starred pro se prisoners respond to something they can’t look up, update or understand?”
Willie McCloud was convicted of being a felon-in-possession. Because he had three prior robberies, the court sentenced him under the Armed Career Criminal Act.
The ACCA provides that the prior crimes making a defendant eligible for an ACCA sentence enhancement must be “committed on occasions different from one another.” Over the years, courts have generally agreed that a crime is successive when a defendant has “a meaningful opportunity to desist … activity before committing the second offense” and “the crimes reflect distinct aggressions.”
The Government argued that Willie’s charging documents showed three separate case numbers assigned to the offenses he committed on August 4, 2008, that Willie and his fellow perps stole from three different people that day, that different kinds of property were stolen, and that the robberies were committed with different co-defendants. Willie seems to have been pretty busy that day.
The 11th Circuit threw out the ACCA enhancement. It held that just because “the charging documents indicate there were unrelated victims and different items stolen does not constitute ‘reliable and specific evidence’ pertaining to the time and location of the offenses, or otherwise indicate that there was a meaningful break between the offenses. We would not consider three temporally and logistically distinct robberies of the same victim to be a single offense. Correlatively, we do not consider – without more evidence – three different victims to indicate that the offenses were temporally or logistically distinct. Similarly, whether the pieces of property stolen were of the same or different types does not indicate the time or place of events. On the face of the charging documents, it is plausible that all three victims were standing in the same location, and each simultaneously gave up the items of value in his pockets. Thus, that there were different victims and the items stolen were two gold chains, one cell phone, and one wallet provides no indication whether the thefts were committed successively rather than simultaneously.”
Last week, President Obama nominated D.C. Circuit Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. The nomination still has to be approved by the Senate – which has promised not to act on it until after the election – and it’s hardly sure that Judge Garland will reach the high court.
Still, special interest groups are already howling that Judge Garland is too progressive and anti-business. Whatever. For prisoners – a one-issue special interest bloc if ever there was one – only one question matters: How is Judge Garland on criminal law issues?
Not so good, it turns out. When Garland was in the running for the Supreme Court in 2010, Washington attorney Tom Goldstein analyzed of Garland’s record for Supreme Court website SCOTUSblog. Although there were few cases to go on (the DC Circuit doesn’t handle many criminal law cases), Goldstein found that Garland tended to take conservative positions on criminal law.
Garland’s “track record shows a substantial sympathy for the government in criminal cases. He rarely votes to overturn a criminal conviction,” Goldstein said. In the 2010 analysis, Goldstein found Garland ruled the “opposite of his more liberal colleagues 10 times, but never goes opposite in the other direction of being more favorably inclined to the defendant.”
In cases where the law is unclear, Garland will probably be more likely to rule against the defendant. So he may not follow the rule of lenity — and side with defendants when criminal law is vague — like Scalia did. “He is a centrist, a call-them-as-I-see-them, I-have-no-interest-in-changing-the-law kind of guy,” Goldstein reported.
The legislative glacier that is the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, before the Senate as S. 2123, and before the House as H.R. 3713, did not budge last week. H.R. 3713 picked up two more cosponsors, Democrats from Georgia and California. The Senate bill remains at 28 cosponsors, while the House measure now has 61.
The Austin American-Statesman and Las Vegas Review-Journalnewspapers strongly supported federal sentence reform last week. And Washington Post columnist George Will wrote a column last Wednesday entitled Sentencing reform alone won’t fix crime and punishment in America, which argued that more effective post-release services had to be adopted along with sentencing reform.
Will noted that “the federal prison population, which devours 25% of the Justice Department’s budget, has increased more than 300 percent in less than 30 years. Only 7% are convicted of violent crimes. Granted, a person in prison poses no threat to the community. The problem is that almost everyone who goes to prison is going to return to the community from which he or she came, and most will not have been improved by the experience of incarceration … What we are not doing well is supervising people released from incarceration. Hence … the “crime-incarceration-crime cycle.” He says “more people are sent to prison each year for violating probation or parole conditions than as a result of conviction for new crimes.”
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
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About 20 years ago, Congress rewrote the habeas corpus laws to sharply limit prisoner access to 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motions. A central component of the change was the requirement that every prisoner gets only one § 2255 motion, unless a court of appeals authorizes a “second-and-successive” § 2255 filing.
Generally, getting permission for a second § 2255 is as rare as a snow squall in August (although if Johnson v. United States becomes retroactive, there’ll be a flurry of such motions). But federal prisoner and serial filer Sheldon Fuller thought he’d figured out a way around the second-and-successive limitation.
Sheldon filed his first § 2255 motion in 2011. It was denied. He sought a certificate of appealability from the 2nd Circuit in order to appeal. The COA was denied, too. But before the Court of Appeals acted on the COA, Sheldon filed a second § 2255 motion, arguing that it was not “second-and-successive” (and thus he did not need Court of Appeals permission to file it), because denial of his first § 2255 was not yet final.
The district court denied the second § 2255 on the merits, too. Likewise, his application for a COA was denied. But – you guessed it – before denial of the second § 2255 was final, Sheldon filed a third § 2255, claiming that it too was not second and successive because his prior § 2255 was still pending. Under Sheldon’s theory, he could keep filing new § 2255s until his release date (which, given his life sentence, was never), as long as he filed the new one before denial of the previous one was final.
Last week, the Second Circuit limited Sheldon’s dog to one bite. Holding that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was intended to give every prisoner one chance for full collateral review, it ruled that because Sheldon’s first § 2255 had “reached final adjudication prior to commencement of the present proceeding, his instant § 2255 motion is successive.” The Court said the rule is that any § 2255 is successive if it “filed subsequent to the conclusion of a proceeding that counts as the first.” Interestingly, however, the Court suggested in a footnote that while Sheldon’s “second § 2255 motion was successive is not currently at issue, we note that it differed from the third § 2255 motion in that the second motion was filed before the adjudication of Fuller’s first § 2255 motion became final.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last week put on hold a Federal Communications Commission order capping prison phone-call rates.
The FCC voted 3-2 last fall to put a rate cap on charges for all phone calls to and from prison inmates. The order was intended to curb what the FCC called “excessive rates and egregious fees” paid by inmates – as high as $14 a minute in some jails (31 times the per-minute cost of a call to Antarctica). The FCC’s rule limits the rate for debit and prepaid calls in state or federal prisons to 11 cents a minute.
The caps were challenged by prison phone companies and several states, which argued that the FCC had exceeded its statutory authority and had unlawfully disregarded the actual costs of providing telephone services to inmates.
How many Federal inmates will come back to prison at some point in their lives? Ask around the table at chow some time. The answers you get will probably be at odds with reality.
Last week, the U.S. Sentencing Commission issued results of a study that reported some sobering facts. Over an 8-year follow-up period, almost half of federal offenders released in 2005 (49.3%) were rearrested for a new crime or rearrested for a violation of supervision conditions. Almost a third (31.7%) of those guys were also reconvicted, and one-quarter (24.6%) of them were reincarcerated over the same study period.
The most dangerous time for a freed inmate is the first two years after release. The Sentencing Comission said that median time from release to rearrest was 21 months.
What’s more, all that talk about “frequent fliers” – people with impressive criminal histories who keep coming back – seems to be true. An inmate’s criminal history closely correlates with recidivism rates. Rearrest rates range from 30.2% for offenders with zero total criminal history points to 80.1% of offenders in the highest Criminal History Category. A federal prisoner’s age at time of release into the community is also closely associated with differences in recidivism rates. Offenders released prior to age 21 had the highest rearrest rate (67.6%), while offenders over 60 years old at the time of release had a recidivism rate of 16.0%.
U.S. District Judge John Gleeson, in his final days on the Eastern District of New York bench before joining a white-shoe Wall Street law firm, last week invented a blueprint for helping people convicted of federal crimes secure jobs.
More than a dozen states issue certificates to ex-offenders who prove rehabilitation, usually by remaining offense-free for a long stretch. The certificates protect prospective employers and may exempt recipients from laws that bar convicted felons from obtaining occupational licenses (now required for about one out of five jobs).
There is no equivalent federal certificate, so Judge Gleeson rolled his own. In an order issued last week, the judge issued a “federal certificate of rehabilitation” to a nurse with a 13-year-old fraud conviction. The defendant – identified only as “Jane Doe” — had been shut out of nursing jobs because of her conviction for a car insurance scam. She did 15 months for it, and was released 12 years ago.
Judge Gleeson – now a litigation partner at Wall Street law firm Debevoise & Plimpton.
Judge Gleeson wrote, “I had no intention to sentence [Doe] to the unending hardship she has endured in the job market … Her conviction makes her no different than any other nursing applicant. In the 12 years since she reentered society after serving her prison sentence, she has not been convicted of any other wrongdoing. She has worked diligently to obtain stable employment, albeit with only intermittent success. Accordingly, I am issuing Doe a federal certificate of rehabilitation.”
The judge expunged the conviction of another defendant in the same case last year, in what legal experts said was the first instance of a federal court erasing a criminal record on the grounds that it interfered with employment. Unsurprisingly, the Justice Department is appealing his order in that case.
Nicholas Ragin was concerned about being charged with running a prostitution ring and dealing drugs. His lawyer, Nikita V. Mackey, however, remained calm … very calm. So calm, in fact, that he slept during the 3-week trial of Nick and his co-conspirators.
The jury convicted Nicholas, and he got 30 years. He filed a § 2255 motion that raised eight different issues, one of which was his complaint that counsel had slept during trial. Nick’s one-paragraph aside in the § 2255 motion became the focus of an evidentiary hearing. Other defense counsel and a juror testified to counsel’s extended napping, with stories such as this one:
Mr. Mackey was sort of sitting back, leaning back in his chair with his left elbow on his left thigh … and sort of with his chin resting on his fist, and government counsel held the document in front of him and he didn’t move, he sort of sat there. Judge Conrad leaned into his microphone, because we were all sitting there and Mackey wasn’t moving and said, ‘Mr. Mackey’ . . . very loudly. Mackey then jumped up and sort of looked around and was licking his lips and moving his mouth and looked sort of confused and looked all over the room except at government counsel. And after a few seconds, he saw government counsel standing there and looked at the document.”
Despite the testimony, the district court denied the § 2255 motion, holding that Nick had not proven that he was prejudiced by counsel’s one-man slumber party. The district judge discounted the juror’s testimony because he thought she perhaps felt “remorse” for the stiff sentence the defendant received.
Last Friday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Nick’s conviction. The decision said, “We find it impossible not to conclude that Mackey was … not functioning as a lawyer during a substantial portion of the trial. Unconscious counsel equates to no counsel at all. Because we have no basis to conclude that an attorney who sleeps through a substantial portion of the trial has exercised judgment on his client’s behalf, ‘we have insufficient basis for trusting the fairness of that trial and consequently must presume prejudice.’ Therefore, the fact that Mackey was sleeping during Ragin’s trial amounted to constructive denial of counsel for substantial periods of that trial.”
Just about everyone knows something about Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 Supreme Court decision that holds the government violates due process when it fails to disclose to the defense evidence favorable to the accused, either because the evidence is exculpatory or because it is impeaching.
Thus, there was a flutter of excitement last week when the Supreme Court tossed a Louisiana murder conviction in a summary reversal that drew a sharp dissent from two conservative justices. The unsigned opinion held that the state court erred in upholding Michael Wearry’s conviction after it turned out that the prosecution withheld information “that could have advanced” Wearry’s defense. The opinion said that “beyond doubt, the newly revealed evidence suffices to undermine confidence in Wearry’s conviction.”
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented, calling it “highly inappropriate” to reverse without granting certiorari so that the State of Louisiana could be heard. The majority retorted that “the Court has not shied away from summarily deciding fact-intensive cases where, as here, lower courts have egregiously misapplied settled law.”
The decision is interesting to anyone who likes seeing a blatant Brady violation, but it does not really extend or expand Brady in any meaningful way. Still, a due process win and a hot cup of coffee is a good way to start a cold spring morning.
Nothing changed on the House or Senate legislative calendars last week for the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (which some call “Sriracha”). The Senate bill (S. 2123) still has 28 cosponsors, while the House measure (H.R. 3713) has 59.
However, people are talking, and for a change, some of the talkers are people who are in a position to know something. Speaking at a Georgetown University Law Center conference last week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said “We are very close to making some changes in this bill so we can get it brought before the United States Senate.”
In January, a group led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) raised concerns that Sriracha could release thousands of violent criminals early. Criminal justice reform advocates argued the bill would not guarantee the release of violent criminals, but simply let their cases get reevaluated by a federal judge.
Sen. Charles Grassley
Last Tuesday, Grassley called Cotton’s concerns “legitimate and reasonable.” While he did not provide specifics on the amendments, Grassley said legislators may have to drop parts of the bill that would have allowed Armed Career Criminal Act inmates get their sentences lowered retroactively.
Ohio State law professor Doug Berman said last week in his sentencing blog that “Senator Grassley also spoke about all the complaints he receives back in Iowa and elsewhere about leaders in DC spending all their time fighting over politics and not getting anything actually done. Senator Grassley’s comments have me now thinking that he and other GOP members of the Senate are likely to stress bipartisan work on sentencing reform when attacked by Democrats and others for ‘not doing anything …’ And work on sentencing reform will not seem all that meaningful if a bill does not come to the floor of the Senate at some point.”
The House also must pass its version of the bill, and there are reasons for concern that the House will not do so unless mens rea reform is a part of the equation. Berman said “every day that goes by without the legislative process moving forward tangibly is yet another day lost before the congressional election season gets into full swing when members of Congress start focusing more on November voting dynamics rather than whether they get anything done on a complicated policy issue that involves lots of compromises and intricacies.”
In what could be a favorable indication of Congressional movement, the Senate last Thursday overwhelmingly passed a broad drug treatment and prevention bill, the largest of its kind since a law in 2008 that mandated insurance coverage for addiction treatment. The New York Times suggested that this legislative accomplishment could be a bipartisan model for Senate cooperation on criminal justice reform.
Former Congressman J.C. Watts (R – Oklahoma), chairman of the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections, wrote a spirited piece in The Hill last week attacking myths about prison reform, such as “all drug offenders are violent” and “law enforcement is opposed to Sriracha.” He concluded that “as Congress contemplates prison reform, it could take a page out of the book of state experiences … There, public officials on both sides of the aisle came together to develop better models, informed by evidence and data, that could reduce prison overcrowding, conserve resources, and enhance public safety. These reform efforts demonstrate that it is indeed possible to promote public safety while being fiscally responsible, creating a more equitable and effective criminal justice system.”
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
If you have a question, contact us using our handy contact page. We don’t charge for initial consultation.
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Could Supreme Court Nominee Battle Help Pass Criminal Reform?
ENGLISH 101
Remember how bored you were in the back of the classroom while your English teacher droned on about conjugation, dependent clauses and prepositional phrases? Here’s another reason you should have paid attention.
Lockhart pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography. Because he had a prior state court conviction for first-degree sexual abuse involv¬ing his adult girlfriend, the district court held that he was subject to a 10-year sentence enhancement triggered by conviction for a crime “relating to aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse, or abusive sexual conduct involving a minor or ward.”
Lockhart argued that the limiting phrase “involving a minor or ward” applied to all three state crimes, so his prior conviction should not trigger the enhancement. But last week, the Supreme Court disagreed. The majority applied the Rule of the Last Antecedent – a rule of statutory interpretation holding that “a limiting clause or phrase … should ordinarily be read as modifying only the noun or phrase that it immediately follow.” The rule means that the phrase “involving a minor or ward” modifies only the immediately preceding noun phrase “abusive sexual conduct.” The phrases “aggravated sexual abuse” and “sexual abuse” are not restricted by the modifier.
The 6-2 opinion admitted that the Rule of the Last Antecedent “can . . . be overcome by other indicia of meaning,” but argued that here, the statute’s context reinforces the conclusion that sexual abuse against anyone – not just a minor – was enough to trigger the enhancement.
Back in the Days of Yore, peasants were simply not allowed to sue the King. Or do anything else, for that matter. Times have changed, but the notion that you cannot sue the king survives in a doctrine known as “sovereign immunity.” In other words, us peasants may not sue the government, unless we get permission from the government to do so
In the case of the federal government, permission comes in the form of the Federal Tort Claims Act, which grants permission to sue the Feds for certain kinds of wrongs, but not others.
The FTCA is what Frank Douglas turned to when he thought he’d been cheated out of BOP inmate pay. Frank was a Performance Grade I inmate employee, working 154 hours a month running a cardboard recycler at FCI Coleman. His boss agreed that he had $91.00 a month coming, but when got paid, Frank found his pay had been cut to about $7.00. Frank alleged his pay had been cut by a lieutenant who said he didn’t “like Inmate Douglas black ass and I’m going to pay him what I want.” Predictably, the government moved to dismiss, arguing that paying inmates for their work was a purely discretionary function, and thus the L-T’s conduct couldn’t be reached under the FTCA.
The FTCA’s discretionary function exception does not waive sovereign immunity for claims “based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency …” The government argued that because the BOP doesn’t have to give inmates jobs to begin with, then obviously, whether to pay them is discretionary as well.
Last week, the 11th Circuit rejected that defense. The court held that the “discretionary function” issue relates to the individual employee – in this case, whether the lieutenant had discretion – not whether the BOP had discretion. Here, the BOP had rules that give prisons discretion to decide which inmates will work and which types of work, if any, will be compensated at which pay grade. But once an inmate’s work is assigned a pay grade and evaluated by his supervisor, the rules made clear that the inmate is entitled to the pay that the supervisor computed. The lieutenant had no discretionary right to change pay that was vested.
Besides, the court said, “if as Mr. Douglas claims, Lt. Barker unilaterally altered Mr. Douglas’s wages out of racial animus, Lt. Barker’s conduct, even if discretionary, “cannot be said to be based on the purposes that the regulatory regime seeks to accomplish.”
Another respected federal judge sharply criticized the criminal justice system recently, focusing primarily on plea bargaining.
“We created this monster and it’s taken on a life of its own,” U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) said during a symposium on crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Feb. 25. He said even in the Southern District of New York – a fairly progressive federal court – his judicial colleagues think sentencing offenders to long prison terms is fair.
Judge Rakoff said he’s seen the system change in the past few decades, from a time where 15 percent of federal criminal cases went to trial to only 3 percent currently. He called the plea bargaining process a “system of totally secret justice” where prosecutors hold “all the cards” and are able to get a vast majority of defendants to plead guilty to charges when faced with extremely long sentences imposed through sentencing guidelines or mandatory minimums.
Julie Seaman, a law professor and president of the Georgia Innocence Project, told the symposium it’s “completely rational for an innocent person to plead guilty because there is so much risk involved in going to trial.” The plea bargaining is done behind closed doors, and “because it’s so totally untransparent,” Judge Rakoff said, it will “inevitably going to lead to some serious mistakes.”
Rodney Roberts, a New Jersey man who pled guilty to a crime of which he was exonerated (only after serving 17 years in prison), said he faced a life sentence if convicted at trial. He said, “Most people ask, ‘What would make an innocent person plead guilty?’ Most people say, ‘Oh I wouldn’t have done that. I would have fought for my innocence.’ My response is always the same, I say, ‘I hope you’re never in that situation.’”
Roberts called it an “assembly-line” process where his overworked public defender coerced him into to take a deal. “I thought, ‘This is the only guy who is on my side,’ if he’s telling me this, then what chance do I have?” he said.
Judge Rakoff said he decided to speak out a few years ago after thinking about all the cases where he was encouraged to impose increasingly longer sentences on low-level criminals. He said the judicial code encourages judges to speak out, but not enough judges do so. “It’s very worrisome to me,” he said. “Who is going to judge the judges? It will be history …”
“Possession” can be a slippery concept. Last week, the 8th Circuit made it a bit slipperier.
Patrelle Green-Bowman and three others were riding in a car stopped by police. A shotgun lay on the back seat, wrapped in Patrelle’s jacket. Patrelle, having a criminal record, was convicted of being a felon-in-possession.
Patrelle argued on appeal that the government had not proved that he – as opposed to other folks in the car – possessed the shotgun. The 8th Circuit rejected his defense. “As we have repeatedly explained,” the Court said, “more than one person may possess a thing. And that remains true even though the government focused on Green-Bowman and did not tell the jury a story about someone else possessing the gun along with him. Without evidence someone else had exclusive control over the shotgun, the presence of other people who might have possessed the weapon does not prove Green-Bowman did not also possess it.”
Of course, the Court said, the fact that Patrice’s jacket was wrapped around the scattergun also helped convince the jury he had control over the weapon.
The late Ed McMahon used to hawk Colonial Penn Life Insurance to older people, warning sternly that “you MUST act now.” Chris McCoy wishes Ed had told him that.
Chris was convicted on a guilty plea, entered before a magistrate judge. Later, he filed a § 2255 motion alleging all sorts of issues. He won the right to a hearing, but his 2255 was ultimately denied.
However, at about the same time, the 7th Circuit ruled in United States v. Harden that the law didn’t let magistrate judges accept guilty pleas. Relying on Harden, Chris filed a motion to set aside his 2255 judgment.
Last week, the 7th Circuit said, “too little, too late.” The Court noted that “a § 2255 appellant cannot raise for the first time on appeal a claim not presented to the district court in the § 2255 proceedings below” unless he can show cause and prejudice, that is, a good reason for raising the issue before and a showing that the issue had an impact on his case.
Chris claimed that Harden was a complete change in the law that was completely unexpected. The 7th Circuit disagreed. It said the “Harden decision on which McCoy bases his claim was issued a full two weeks before the hearing in the district court on his § 2255 motion. Harden was not an obscure, unpublished order dealing with a minor legal matter in a distant district. Rather, it was a published decision of this court that originated from the same district and even the same judge as McCoy’s case.”
Chris should have amended his 2255 motion as soon as was issued. Trying to reopen the case on a Rule 60(b) motion left Chris a day late and a dollar short.
Johnson was decided June 26, 2015. Under 28 U.S.C. § 2255(f)(3), inmates have one year from that date to file for relief as a result of Johnson’s holding. That one-year period runs from last summer, not from whatever date in the future that Johnson is held to be retroactive. Dodd v. United States, 545 U.S. 353 (2005).
So a lot of people who need permission to file a second-and-successive 2255 motion are filing now, to get in line for approval whenever Welch is decided. However, 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(3)(D) says a Court of Appeals “shall grant or deny the authorization to file a second-or-successive application not later than 30 days after the filing of the motion.” So if someone files now, the Court would have to act the motion before the Supreme Court decides Welch, meaning that the second-or-successive application is doomed.
That is, it’s doomed unless – as the 11th Circuit held last week – “shall” doesn’t really mean “shall.” Citing a Supreme Court decision about a different statute, the 11th Circuit said “[t]hough ‘shall’ generally means ‘must,’ legal writers sometimes use . . . ‘shall’ to mean ‘should,’ ‘will,’ or even ‘may’ … We hold that ‘shall’ in § 2244(b)(3)(D) indicates a preference for a decision within 30 days but does not mean ‘must’ in all circumstances.”
Seven other circuits have held the same. Only the 3rd, 5th, 8th and D.C. circuits are excluded, because the question has not yet arisen there.
What the holding means is that a second-and-successive application raising Johnson will be held in abeyance until Johnson’s retroactivity is settled, regardless of the 30-day clock in the statute.
COULD SUPREME COURT NOMINEE BATTLE HELP PASS CRIMINAL REFORM?
The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (which some call “Sriracha”) now before the Senate as S. 2123, and before the House as H.R. 3713, did not advance last week. H.R. 3713 picked up two more cosponsors, Democrats, from Ohio, Illinois and Florida. The Senate bill remains at 28 cosponsors, while the House measure has 59.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)
However, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), one of the sponsors of Sriracha, suggested in the conservative Daily Signal recently that the Senate fight over the next Supreme Court nominee could help the chances of a criminal justice reform overhaul passing Congress this year. Sen. Lee said, “We in the Senate naturally want to find areas where there is significant bipartisan agreement, and this is one of them. The fact we disagree in some areas makes it much more important for us to pass bills like the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, and in that respect, it makes it more likely we will.”
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey – already a Sriracha supporter – wrote last week in The Hill, a newspaper covering Congress, that he was one of “the original supporters of the 1990s ‘tough on crime’ laws. After decades of enforcing them, I … now recognize many provisions, like overly harsh sentencing, went too far … The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act recalibrates sentencing policy to meet the needs of the 21st century. Lowering mandatory minimum sentences for low-level crimes will reduce unnecessary incarceration. This will allow us to better direct law enforcement resources to arresting, prosecuting, and punishing the most serious and violent criminals.”
The Sunlight Foundation, an organization that monitors Congressional lobbying, reported last week that nearly 30 organizations spent over $27 million to influence Sriracha in 2015. The groups included the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys – which paid a lobbyist $60,000 last year to fight Sriracha – and others like the American Civil Liberties Union, NAACP, Starbucks, Gun Owners of America and the United Methodist Church. Sunlight Foundation said, “Due to vague disclosure laws, it is impossible to pinpoint exactly how much these groups are spending to specifically influence the Sentencing Reform Act. But we do know these organizations are powerful players in Washington …”
Much of the recent battle over criminal justice reform has centered around Republican attempts to strengthen the mens rea requirement. Writing in the National Law Journal last week, two experienced criminal defense attorneys said “it may come as a surprise to many in the bar, but some legislators in Congress, at the strong urging of federal prosecutors and even members of the media, are balking at bipartisan legislation aimed at ensuring a default intent requirement kicks in where a federal criminal law’s intent requirement, or mens rea, is unclear or absent. The question of intent, of course, is always crucial. That is one important experience we have witnessed in our combined 55 years as criminal defense lawyers. From working as appointed counsel for the poor, to representing people accused of every sort of crime, we have seen first-hand the steady erosion of the intent requirement.”
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
If you have a question, contact us using our handy contact page. We don’t charge for initial consultation.
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Richard Adams found convenience stores to be convenient places to get money. Using a gun, he robbed a string of them. He was charged with eight counts, including being a felon in possession of a gun in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) (“F-I-P”), due to some prior North Carolina drug trafficking convic-tions. Like most defendants, he signed a plea agreement in which he waived the right to file any appeal or Sec. 2255 motion.
A few years later, the 4th Circuit handed down United States v. Simmons, holding that a lot of hybrid North Carolina drug convictions that had looked like felonies were really misdemeanors. All of a sudden, Richie’s prior felonies were no longer felonies, meaning that he was actually innocent of being a felon-in-possession. He filed a Sec. 2255 motion, asking that that one conviction be vacated. The Government argued that his waiver meant that he could not do anything about the F-I-P count.
Last week, the 4th Circuit said Richie’s waiver did not keep him from showing he was innocent. The Court said, “We will refuse to enforce an otherwise valid waiver if to do so would result in a miscarriage of justice. A proper showing of ‘actual innocence’ is sufficient to satisfy the ‘miscarriage of justice’ requirement. Such a showing renders the claim outside the scope of the waiver.”
The district court had complained that Adams could not show he was prejudiced by the F-I-P conviction, because without it, the court would have given him the same sentence. The Court of Appeals didn’t think much of this reasoning, noting that “the government wisely does not press this argument on appeal. Felony convictions carry a myriad of collateral consequences above and beyond time in prison, including the possibility that a future sentence will be enhanced based on the challenged conviction, the possibility of using the conviction for future impeachment, and societal stigma. Because an erroneous conviction and accompanying sentence, even a concurrent sentence, can have significant collateral consequences, the fact that Adams’s sentence would not change does not bar his claim.”
Two Court of Appeals decisions last week on Sec. 3582(c)(2) motions split the ticket for defendants.
When the dust settled in 1998, Charles Robinson was convicted of three drug-trafficking counts, with a Guidelines range of life. The court couldn’t give him life on the counts of conviction, so it did what it could – sentencing him to the max of 40 years on two of the counts, and the max of 20 years on the other, all consecutive to each other. It was 100 years – as close to life as the judge could get.
Thirteen years later Amendment 782 to the Guidelines retroactively reduced the base offense level for Charles’ crimes from 43 to 42. The effect was to change the recommended guidelines sentence from life to 30 years to life. When Charles filed for a sentence reduction, the judge reduced his sentence, but thought he had to keep the sentences consecutive. So Charles got 30 years on each of two counts, and kept 20 years on the third – with all three sentences still running wild – for an 80-year sentence.
Last week, the 7th Circuit reversed. It explained that when Charles was sentenced, “his recommended guideline sentence was longer (life, as we said) than the maximum permissible sentence on any one count. The judge thus had to make the sentences on the individual counts consecutive in order to get as close to a life sentence as he could. As a result of Amendment 782, however, the low end of the defendant’s guidelines range — 30 years — dropped below the statutory maximum for any single count (40 years), and if a judge wants to sentence a defendant at the bottom of the new guidelines range he can do so by imposing sentences not exceeding 30 years on each count and making all the sentences run concurrently, as authorized by U.S.S.G. § 5G1.2(c) – 80 years is not the floor.”
Things didn’t work out as well for Eric Smith in the 6th Circuit. When he was sentenced in 1994, he qualified as a career offender under Guidelines Sec. 4B1.1. However, his Guidelines level under the drug-quantity table was higher, so the court applied Sec. 2D1.1, and gave him 30 years.
Eric applied for a reduction under Amendment 782, but last week, the 6th Circuit shot him down. Noting that the career-offender offense level applies only when it is greater than the otherwise applicable offense level, the Court did the math. “Smith’s career-offender offense level – both at his sentencing and under current law – is 37. If Amendment 782 had been in effect at Smith’s sentencing, his drug-trafficking offense level would have been 34, which produces a Guidelines range of 262 to 327 months when combined with Smith’s criminal history category. Because 37 is greater than 34, the district court would have applied the career-offender offense level if Amendment 782 had been in effect at Smith’s sentencing. An offense level of 37 combined with Smith’s criminal history category of VI produces the same Guidelines range that the district court applied at Smith’s sentencing: 360 months to life.”
“So much of sentencing discretion is vested now in the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour (W.D. Washington) said in a magazine article last week. “By their charging decisions, they can tie the hands of the sentencing judge, particularly on mandatory minimums. And [prosecutors’] discretion, by the way, is exercised in darkness.” By that, he suggests that prosecutors can charge defendants under any statute they choose, and their charging decisions are unreviewable.
If that statute carries a hefty minimum sentence, the judge cannot lighten the punishment. “What we do,” Judge Coughenour said, referring to judges, “we do out in the sunlight, and we have to be subject to appellate review. We have to explain ourselves. We have to endure press reaction to what we do.” Nobody reviews the U.S. attorney’s decisions. “In fact,” says Coughenour, “we are precluded from reviewing those charging decisions. And here you have people who are put on the bench by the president of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate—presumably for their judgment. I mean, that’s why they call it ‘judging’.”
A former AUSA, Mark Osler – a law professor who worked as a prosecutor in Detroit in the 1990s – agreed: “The whole structure is still guidelines-focused … That baseline seems so objective. It’s a number, and there’s this presumptive objectivity when you’re looking at something that says, ‘121 months.’ Because it’s so specific, it has this veneer of science around it. Where, in reality, it’s pretty much just made up.”
Everyone knows that the three most important factors in real estate are location, location, location. It turns out the same is true for defendants wanting to get Rule 35 sentence reductions.
The Government uses two mechanisms to reward cooperating defendants. They can either get a reduction at sentencing for substantial cooperation, a Government motion under U.S.S.G. Sec. 5K1.1, or – if the assistance comes later or is not complete by sentencing – they get resentenced to less time when the Government makes a motion under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 35(b).
Last week, the United States Sentencing Commission released a 42-page study of the use of Rule 35(b) motions. The report, which reviewed nearly 11,000 Rule 35(b) reductions over the last six years, found that
• Rule 35(b) sentencing reductions are used relatively rarely, although a few districts use them often.
• Most defendants receiving a Rule 35(b) reduction were originally sentenced within their guideline ranges. This suggests that courts rarely depart or vary for reasons other than substantial assistance with this group of defendants.
• Most defendants receiving a Rule 35(b) reduction were convicted of a drug trafficking offense with a mandatory minimum sentence.
• Rule 35(b) reductions generally provide less benefit than do Sec. 5K1.1 substantial assistance departures. This is true whether the Rule 35(b) sentencing reduction is compared to the 5K1.1 substantial assistance departure in terms of the ultimate sentence length or by the percentage extent of the reduction from the original sentence.
• Rule 35(b) sentencing reductions are usually less beneficial than 5K1.1 departures, but defendants who get both a 5K1.1 departure and a Rule 35(b) reduction enjoy the largest overall reduction in their sentences, regardless of how that reduction is measured.
• Defendants sentenced in jurisdictions that primarily use Rule 35(b) reductions overall receive less benefit for their substantial assistance than do those in jurisdictions that rely primarily on 5K1.1 departures or a combination of Rule 35(b) reductions and 5K1.1 departures.
NOTHING NEW ABOUT DESCAMPS: 8TH CIRCUIT DENIES RETROACTIVITY
In 2005, a jury convicted Will Head-bird of being a felon-in-possession, and applied the Armed Career Criminal Act because of his prior felonies. Headbird was sentenced to 327 months in prison. Nine years later, Headbird argued that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Descamps v. United States meant that his prior convictions were not violent, and that his sentence should be cut to 10 years.
Last week, the 8th Circuit declared Headbird’s motion was too late, because Descamps did not create a newly recognized right that applied retroactively to 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2255 cases.
Sec. 2255(f)(3) gives inmates one year to file a 2255 after the Supreme Court decides a case announcing “new rule” that “breaks new ground or imposes a new obligation on the states or the federal government.” A case like Descamps announces a new rule if the “result was not dictated by precedent,” that is, if the case’s outcome would not have been “apparent to all reasonable jurists.” Rules that just apply an existing principle to a new set of facts typically do not constitute new rules.
The 8th Circuit found that Descamps just applied existing general principles governing the categorical and modified categorical approaches to indivisible statutes. The Supreme Court said its Descamps opinion was “all but” resolved by prior decisions. Thus, the 8th Circuit said, Headbird’s motion does not rely on a right that was “newly recognized” by the Supreme Court, and was much too late.
Debate continued unabated in the press, however. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week by a criminal law professor argued that “relatively few prisoners today are locked up for drug offenses.” Of state prisoners, only “about 16%, or 208,000 people, are incarcerated for drug crimes. Of those, less than a quarter were in for mere possession … Critics of “mass incarceration” often point to the federal prisons, where half of inmates, or about 96,000 people, are drug offenders. But 99.5% of them are traffickers. The notion that prisons are filled with young pot smokers, harmless victims of aggressive prosecution, is patently false.”
The Journal-Star editorial was sparked by a remarkable sentencing Feb. 12 in Lincoln federal court. U.S. District Judge John Gerrard roundly criticized the 10-year sentence he was giving to a nonviolent, recovering meth user. “The only reason I’m imposing the sentence that I am imposing today is because I have to,” he told the defendant. “That’s what Congress mandates.” The judge called the defendant “Exhibit A for why Congress should pass the Smart on Crime Act.” Last June, in a similar case, he called another defendant the poster child for it. In both of the cases, Judge Gerrard – a former Nebraska Supreme Court justice – said the sentence didn’t fit the crime. “There should be imprisonment,” he said, “but 10 years in cases like these is ridiculous, draconian even.”
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
If you have a question, contact us using our handy contact page. We don’t charge for initial consultation.
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You’re Entitled To Your Own Opinion – Just Not Your Own Facts
BOP to Sentencing Commission – ‘Drop Dead’
Quiet Week For Sentencing Reform
LIKE THIS, NOT LIKE THAT
Jackie Mize wanted to sell oxycontin with his sons. Intending to do it right, he went to Florida to observe a large-scale opiate “doctor shopping” enterprise run by Trent Bussell. Like Samsung copying the iPhone, Mr. Mize went back to Tennessee to mimic Bussell in his own operation.
The Mizes got caught. At their trial, the government introduced a lot of evidence about how the Bussell conspiracy worked in order to explain to the jury how the Mizes operated.
Last Thursday, the 6th Circuit reversed their conviction, finding one of the rarest of all animals: a variance between the indictment and proof that prejudiced the Mizes. The Court of Appeals said, “We understand why the government did what it did — the theme of its case was that Defendants were inspired by the Bussell conspiracy to create their own conspiracy operating in a substantially similar manner. But … the government could have easily explained to the jury that this case involves a conspiracy which was formed by Jackie Mize and that the idea for the conspiracy originated when Jackie learned of the Bussell conspiracy. That was really all that needed to be said about the Bussell conspiracy. Instead, the extensive proof presented by the government on the Bussell conspiracy likely distracted the jury from the relevant issues—all to Defendants’ prejudice.”
Judges tend to give their orders plain vanilla titles, like Opinion and Order. But a recent order issue by a federal judge in Houston shows that titles don’t have to be bland.
Judge Lynn N. Hughes, known for being plainspoken, was unhappy with the circuitous effort by a Washington, D.C., DOJ lawyer to obtain a transcript from the case, one that involved a suspect accused of providing material support to Islamic State. In his Order on Ineptitude, the Judge said, “If the pretentious lawyers from ‘main’ justice knew what they were doing – or had the humility to ask for help from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas – it would not have taken three days, seven telephone calls, three voicemail messages, and one snippy electronic message for them to indirectly ask the court for assistance in ordering a transcript.”
Some observers – probably those who had dealt with “main” justice before – found it funny. Others, like the online service Litigation Daily, whined that Judge Hughes had acted like “a bully” in “his shameful treatment of [the] Justice Department lawyer.”
Two courts grappled with consecutive sentences last week, leaving defendants 1-and-1 on the issue.
In one case, Heriberto Almonte-Reyes was sentenced for drugs in Puerto Rico. At the time, everyone knew he had a money laundering case going on in Atlanta. The Puerto Rico federal court sentenced him to 120 months, consecutive to anything he might get in Georgia.
The Georgia federal court later gave him 87 months, but made it concurrent with the earlier sentence. Herbie appealed the Puerto Rico sentence. The government agreed the later sentence should make everything concurrent, but complained that Herbie should have filed a BP-9 or habeas corpus instead.
The 1st Circuit ruled Herbie’s sentences should be concurrent, holding that a district court has no power to order a sentence run to consecutive to another one that does not yet exist. As for the government’s suggestion to let the BOP handle it, the Court of Appeals noted that “it is not a foregone conclusion that Almonte-Reyes will be considered eligible for relief through those alternative mechanisms … [and] it cannot be that the possibility of future success on habeas would moot [his] direct appeal of his sentence.” Anyone who has ever filed a BP-9 would agree.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, drug dealer Harold Lacy was facing unrelated state charges when he got sentenced to 168 months in federal court. Under his plea agreement, the government was to recommend the 168-month sentence, which it did. But then, the AUSA told the court “there’s a pending case in Macon County right now, and the State’s Attorney has asked us to ask you to run the sentences consecutive … As a courtesy to a fellow prosecutor, I’m relaying their request to you.” The judge was glad to oblige, ruling that Lacy’s federal sentence would be consecutive to any state sentence that might be imposed.
In his plea agreement, Lacy waived all appellate rights, so the 7th Circuit threw out his appeal of the Government’s trickeration. But it was concerned:
“Lacy’s appeal of his sentence is foreclosed by his waiver, and thus we must dismiss the appeal. Nevertheless, the consecutive sentence gives us pause. Lacy’s state crime was unrelated to his federal heroin conviction, so we would not question the substantive decision to impose a consecutive sentence. But the impetus for the consecutive sentence — extending a courtesy to a state prosecutor—was not a proper sentencing consideration.”
YOU’RE ENTITLED TO YOUR OWN OPINION – JUST NOT YOUR OWN FACTS
A principal goal of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, which would lower penalties for many drug offenses, is to reduce mass incarceration in the United States. The most popular explanation for the U.S.’s relatively high imprisonment rate is the ferocity of federal drug law enforcement. Countries that have decriminalized all drug possession are often believed to offer an alternative policy that reserves prison mainly for offenders convicted of rape, homicide and other serious non-drug crimes.
The truth is more complicated, according to an analysis of international prison data released last Thursday. While the U.S. has a huge inmate population by international standards, the percentage of prisoners serving time for drugs is just 20%, putting the U.S. in the middle of a pack of 10 developed Western countries. The numbers range from a low of 12% for Australia to 39% for Italy.
The reason, according to the study, is that federal prison is unique among U.S. correctional systems. Most federal inmates are not violent, and almost half are serving time for drug-related offenses. In state prisons – which house 87% of U.S. inmates – increasing sentences for violent crimes while cutting drug sentence would worsen mass incarceration. But in the small, atypical federal prison system, the report found, the Senate’s approach should have the opposite effect.
Another report last week by Brookings Institution argued that fewer than half of federal drug offenders are involved with organization or management of the drug trade. Most are low-level offenders – street-level dealers, brokers, couriers or mules – “who play who play a relatively low-level role in drug distribution.” The report concludes that “the social and economic impact of incarceration [is] substantial and well documented. As debate on criminal justice reform continues, lawmakers must ask themselves whether low-level drug offenders pose such a danger to public safety as to merit additional time behind bars.”
Except the BOP. The Bureau told the USSC that its implementation of 18 USC Sec. 3582(c)(1) is in good shape. After all, only 11 inmates died while waiting for BOP action on their compassionate release requests last year. The agency granted about 200 of 3,000 requests (about 7%) since 2013, 31 alone in the last two months.
The BOP witnesses told the Sentencing Commission that the decision whether to recommend an inmate for a compassionate release was solely the BOP’s right, and the Commission should not be sticking its nose into that process by adopting guidelines. For that matter, the BOP said, it rejected the critical report of the DOJ inspector general, who found in 2013 that the Bureau “poorly managed” the program.
Several USSC members, –– notably Judge Charles R. Brayer – did not react well to the BOP reserving for itself whether to decide to recommend people for release. The Judge complained that the BOP release “process takes so long that … people die, quite simply.” He demanded to know “why is it that BOP is particularly well suited to assess impact on the community” in compassionate release cases. Why shouldn’t courts have input on it instead of the BOP?”
Instead of the USSC taking control of the program and giving the courts clear instructions on how to act, BOP witness Jonathan Wroblewski suggested the Commission bring its guidelines into line with the BOP’s initiatives so as to prevent “competing policies.”
“I’m not totally sure what the department feels our function would be if you get to set the rules, if you get to do whatever you want,” Commissioner Rachel Barkow told Wroblewski. “I guess I don’t really understand where there’s any effect to the commission’s role in the statute under the department’s reading.”
The USSC will recommend changes in the compassionate release Guidelines at the end of April.
QUIET WEEK FOR SENTENCING REFORM
Congress was not in session last week, instead taking a week off for legislators to spend at home. Regular legislative sessions resume today.
But people were still talking about the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, called “Sriracha” for short. In the Feb. 11 issue of Forbes, contributor Jacob Sullum complained that some senators were misusing the Wendall Callahan case to demonize Sriracha. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) told colleagues in a letter the week before that “the possible release of thousands of violent criminals is a risky and possibly devastating social experiment in criminal leniency … If this grand experiment goes awry, how many lives will be ruined? How many lives will be lost? How many families will be torn apart?”
Sullum pointed out that Callahan – the inmate released early who is now accused of killing three people in Columbus (see “Reform Meets Willie Horton, LISA Newsletter of February 8, 2016) – was not typical of federal drug offenders. Callahan had several violent crime priors, including shooting someone and choking his girlfriend. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics 2015 report, “the vast majority of federal drug offenders are not convicted of using guns.” Sullum argued that “whatever political games erstwhile reformers may play, the fact remains that federal drug sentences are arbitrary and excessive … Once Congress recognizes that sentences are unjust, forcing current prisoners to complete them is neither fair nor reasonable.”
The Los Angeles Times complained in an editorial last week that Sriracha “is now threatened by exaggerated accusations that it would lead to the release of thousands of violent criminals and by a demand that the legislation include new and controversial language defining the “criminal intent” necessary for a conviction … Criminal intent is an important principle. As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted last year, under American law a defendant must be “blameworthy in mind” before he can be found guilty. At some point Congress may want to take up the issue of whether the intent requirement should be clarified. But there is no reason to hold this bill hostage … First things first.”
However, the New York Times published an opinion piece urging Democrats to back the Republican push to include mens rea reform in Sriracha: “It would be a shame,” the Times said, “if partisan distrust kept Democrats from supporting a proposal favored by the right: a measure that would bolster the idea that a criminal conviction should require proof of what lawyers call “mens rea” — literally, a guilty mind. That’s because it can be harnessed to aid some of those who are especially ill treated by the criminal justice system: the poor and racial minorities.”
Finally, last week the National League of Cities – an organization representing cities and towns in all 50 states – announced that passage of federal criminal justice reform is one of its six federal priorities for 2016, a list that includes closing sales tax loopholes, changing the EPA’s clean water rules and raising money for mass transit. NLC calls on Congress to “pass the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (S. 2123), which adjusts prison sentences for certain non-violent drug offenders, targets violent criminals, and supports recidivism reduction programs. We also support the Second Chance Reauthorization Act (S. 1513/H.R. 3406), which would provide resources to local governments to improve outcomes for individuals returning to communities reducing in recidivism rates.”
Legal Information Services Associates provides research and drafting services to lawyers and inmates. With over 20 years experience in post-conviction motions and sentence modification strategy, we provide services on everything from direct appeals to habeas corpus to sentence reduction motions to halfway house and home confinement placement. If we can help you, we’ll tell you that. If what you want to do is futile, we’ll tell you that, too.
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Research, Strategy, Tactics and Support for Lawyers
Last month, U.S. District Judge John Gerrard (already in the news for his opposition to mandatory minimum sentences) denied Cavanaugh’s motion: “What drives the FSM’s devout followers, aka Pastafarians?” the Judge’s opinion asked. “Some say it’s the assuring touch from the FSM’s Noodly Appendage. There are those who love the worship service, which is conducted in Pirate-Speak and attended by congregants in dashing buccaneer garb. Still others are drawn to the Church’s flimsy moral standards, religious holidays every Friday, and the fact that Pastafarian Heaven is way cooler. Does your Heaven have a Stripper Factory and a Beer Volcano? Intelligent Design has finally met its match—and it has nothing to do with apes or the Olive Garden of Eden.”
