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Prosecutorial power, victims rights, sentencing judgments and judicial empathy

By Douglas A. Berman

Two very different post by Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy have me thinking this morning about all the topics in the title of this post.  Here are the links: Additional Sentencing Briefs in Lori Drew Case Legal Ambiguity, Empathy, and the Role of Judicial Power The first post provides links to the fascinating supplemental sentencing briefs in the Lori Drew cyber-bullying case.  There are lots of remarkable aspects to those briefs, perhaps the most notable being that federal prosecutors are seeking a statutory max of 3 years in prison for Drew for three misdemeanor convictions and that they are pressing a very broad interpretation of the CVRA (no doubt because a vocal "victim" is going to support their sentencing suggestions).  In response, the defense's legal team (which includes Orin Kerr) quotes from Attorney General Robert Jackson's famed 1940 speech about abuses of prosecutorial power and complains repeatedly about the fact that "the goal of the government?s case has been to make Lori Drew the public face of cyberbullying...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on May 14, 2009 (boomark / email).