Federal Judiciary

Lori Loughlin gets two months...

With as much subtlety and sophistication as a sledgehammer, social media erupted after Felicity Huffman?s 14-day sentence was announced, with commenter after commenter saying her sentence was way too light. A rich, white woman only received two weeks in jail. The system must be corrupt! Well, the system is corrupt, but not because Huffman?s sentence was too light, but because it was too severe.

But wait, you might be saying, she only received a few weeks; how can that be too severe?

Her sentence is wrong for at least four reasons:

1.    Our criminal justice system still has an unjust ?jail-first? mentality. The default sentence for a first-time non-violent offender who accepted responsibility where no one suffered any loss should obviously be something other than incarceration. If that type of offender ? with no aggravating factors ? isn?t getting probation, then who is? The problem is that we are so tied to putting people in jail, even people we know will never do anything similar again, that our default is some prison. That?s wrong. It?s important to keep things in perspective: Huffman didn?t hurt anyone and it?s not altogether clear that paying someone to take a test should even be a federal crime in the first place.   

2.    Comparisons to other sentences show that those sentences are too high, not that Huffman?s is too low. With no sense of irony, the Huffman prosecutor cited other cases in which defendants received grossly and inappropriately high sentences as a reason to impose prison time on Huffman. For example, the prosecutor pointed to the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, an African-American woman who originally was sentenced to five years in prison for using her dad?s address to get her kids into a different school district. The sentenced was later suspended to 10 days in jail. Everyone agrees: That sentence ? even after it was reduced to 10 days ? was obscene. Saying that Huffman should not get a probationary sentence because another prosecutor obtained an unjust sentence in another case demonstrates why we have a mass-incarceration problem. The prosecutor said at the Huffman sentencing: ?If we believe in just punishment, we should not put the Williams-Bolars in jail while letting the Huffmans go free.? That?s true, but it means that we shouldn?t put the Williams-Bolars in jail, not that we should put both in prison. 

Full post as published by Southern District of Florida on August 23, 2020 (boomark / email).