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"Federal Judges Still Finding Their Way in Post-'Booker' Sentencing Landscape"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the headline of this new article by Mary Pat Gallagher in the New Jersey Law Journal. Here is how it gets started: Five years after the Supreme Court held that the federal sentencing guidelines are no longer binding but merely advisory, judges for the most part continue to follow them, though there is an ever-growing divergence, according to the most recent federal sentencing statistics. But judges are still struggling to grasp the degree of discretion the Court handed back to them in U.S. v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), which held that the guidelines violate the Sixth Amendment right to a jury because they required harsher sentences based on facts found by judges rather than jurors.  Instead of tossing the guidelines, the Booker Court said judges must take them into account, along with other factors listed in the sentencing law, 18 U...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on April 23, 2010 (boomark / email).