Legal Research

"Calls for Probe of Federal Sentencing Patterns"

This post was written by Chuck Kallendorf: "Marcia Coyle's National Law Journal article, yesterday morning, has covered a few bases in the legal community's blogsphere, but we're referencing it, too, because of its foreshadowings.

"..widely disparate sentences don't make sense, ignore federal sentencing guidelines and are a sign of a potentially very big problem, according to the U.S. Department of Justice," Coyle's article begins. "The DOJ wants the U.S. Sentencing Commission to investigate, with special attention to guidelines for fraud and child pornography crimes. But some sentencing experts say it may be something that the commission does not want to examine too closely.

"The department called for a 'comprehensive review' of the state of federal sentencing in its most recent annual report to the commission on June 28. In the five years since a U.S. Supreme Court decision struck down the mandatory nature of federal sentencing guidelines, the department said, prosecutors' experiences and data 'suggest that federal sentencing practice is fragmenting into at least two distinct and very different sentencing regimes...'

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Source: Hamilton County Law Library Blog, 20 July 2010. Reproduced with permission.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on July 21, 2010 (boomark / email).