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

BRINGING FORTH A MOUSE

The US Sentencing Commission held its long-anticipated April meeting last Thursday, taking up weighty proposals to reduce the methamphetamine purity guidelines and to bring some sense to the career offender label.

It brought forth a mouse.

No changes in meth, no changes in career offender status…. Everything that was adopted passed quickly and unanimously. Everything that was abandoned disappeared without comment, like one of those old-time Kremlin photos where the image of a newly-disfavored apparatchik was crudely cut out of an official photo.

Writing in the Sentencing Matters substack, Jonathan Wroblewski (a 35-year veteran of the Dept of Justice and long-time ex officio member of the Sentencing Commission) summed up last week’s meeting:

With expectations high, the Commission’s 2024–25 and 2025–26 amendment years ended in April 2025 and again last Thursday with short, opaque public meetings — genuinely unbecoming given the importance of the issues at stake and the extensive process leading up to them. The Commission voted on some of the published amendment proposals but not on others. It offered no explanation for the consequential choices it made and the actions it took. It was a profound disappointment in transparent policymaking.

As has become its habit, the Commission held a short and seemingly scripted meeting in which nothing was discussed, nothing was debated, and nothing was explained. Like the backlog of guidelines for which retroactivity was proposed in 2024 and 2025 – only to die without further mention – the guideline amendments that were rejected simply disappeared.

The proposed amendments that made it through the Commission’s process include

• addition of new paths for offenders to get credit for presentence rehabilitative efforts.
• increased emphasis on the availability of sentences eligible for probation, home confinement and split sentences.
• restructuring of the loss table for economic crimes to account for inflation over the past decade.
• elimination of the sophisticated means enhancement, and
• a new enhancement to account for the non-economic harm suffered by victims of economic crimes.

The only drug guideline change to be adopted was a boost in fentanyl-related sentencing levels, adopted to implement the HALT Fentanyl Act of 2025 (HR 27). Apparently, for all of the options proposed to moderate the meth guidelines, the Commission decided to do nothing. I say “apparently” because, as usual, the USSC provided no explanation why some proposals did not make the cut.

The abandonment of the “career offender” proposal is troubling. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 directs the Commission to ensure that “career offenders” receive sentences near the statutory maximum. The Commission’s definition of what constitutes a career offender, however, has caught many defendants in the net whose criminal histories do not suggest “career criminal” by any stretch of the imagination.

The change in the “career offender” guidelines would have abandoned the current “categorical approach” to what prior convictions were crimes of violence or drug offenses, substituting instead a list of federal and state crimes that apply. Burglary would no longer apply, felonies of any kind for which the defendant served less than 90 days would not apply, and defendants would have a chance to show that some crimes of violence should not count because their conduct was completely nonviolent.

Forget that change.

Last December, the Commission asked for public comment on options to change the methamphetamine guidelines. One proposal is to simply eliminate the Guidelines distinction among a meth mixture, meth (actual), and high-purity ice. All meth would be scored the same. An alternative option would be to keep the distinctions in the current meth Guidelines but offer reductions for people who had minor roles, who qualified for the 18 USC § 3553(f) safety valve, or who were involved only because of family relationships or duress.

Forget that change, too.

The commission, chaired by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves (SD Mississippi), currently has five voting members, with two empty seats. During President Trump’s first term, the Commission lost its quorum. Trump appointed people so far outside the mainstream – such as Eastern District of Virginia US District Judge Henry “Hang “Em High” Hudson – that even a Republican-controlled Senate wouldn’t confirm them. The upshot was that the Commission went five years without being able to amend the Guidelines until President Biden appointed new members.

Ohio State University law professor Doug Berman, writing in his Sentencing Law and Policy blog, said, “In the end, though, the amendments voted on today are more fairly described as modest rather than major. I am generally inclined to want to celebrate the ‘less is more’ character of today’s amendment. And yet, with the Commission’s very future a bit uncertain given current and possible future Commissioner vacancies…”

The nutshell answer? Lost opportunities.

USSC, Reader-Friendly Proposed Sentencing Amendments (April 16, 2026)

Sentencing Matters, The Failure of President Biden’s Sentencing Commission (April 20, 2026)

Law 360, Sentencing Commission Votes To Enact Modest Reform Agenda (April 16, 2026)

National Law Journal, ‘No Longer One Size Fits All’: Tweaks to U.S. Sentencing Guidelines May Ease White-Collar Penalties, Cut Litigation (April 17, 2026)

HR 27, HALT Fentanyl Act of 2025

Sentencing Law and Policy, After lots of major proposals, US Sentencing Commission adopts some modest guideline reforms (April 16, 2026)

~ Thomas L. Root