Tag Archives: sentence reform; statistics

No Action on Sentence Reform… and None Likely – Update for January 25, 2017

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

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YOU’LL GET NOTHING AND LIKE IT

The 115th Congress has been in session for about three weeks now. The incoming Trump Administration has kept it busy, but not on criminal justice reform.


nothing170125A session of Congress is two years long, meaning that the 115th will run until December 2018. Both Houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, although the Party’s 52-48 hold on the Senate is slight.

Under the law, each Congress starts fresh. That means that all of the bills pending last year – including the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act – are gone. Congress will be starting over fresh – bills will have to be reintroduced and go through all the normal steps before they can become law. To become law, the measures must be approved by the Judiciary Committee of each chamber, and then passed by the full U.S. House and U.S. Senate, and signed by the president.

So far, there’s been a whole lot of nothing on criminal justice. With over 600 House and 180 Senate bills introduced, none addresses sentencing reform.

But will there be? Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), now in line to be Attorney General when the Senate votes on it after Jan. 31, previously called Obama’s commutations an “unprecedented” and “reckless” abuse of executive power. President Trump, before he was inaugurated, complained that the prisoners whose sentences were being commuted were “bad dudes.”

Like Trump, Sessions conflates drug offenders with violent criminals. He argues that “drug trafficking can in no way be considered a ‘non-violent’ crime,” even when it does not involve violence.

What happened in Saginaw, Michigan, earlier this week does nothing to convince Sen. Sessions that he’s over-reacting. Demarlon C. Thomas, a former member of Saginaw’s Sunny Side Gang who had his 19-year prison sentence commuted to 10 years by Obama last fall, was shot to death in what appears to have been an execution. Two rifle-wielding gunmen broke into the halfway house, and while one assailant held 23 halfway house residents at gunpoint, the other sought out Thomas and shot him five times.

callahan160208This kind of graphic shooting, like Wendell Callahan’s murder spree in Columbus a year ago, provide grist for those – like Sessions and Trump – “who reject a central point of agreement underlying bipartisan support for sentencing reform: that there is an important distinction between violent criminals and offenders who engage in peaceful activities arbitrarily proscribed by Congress,” as Reason put it. Although Sessions was a supporter of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 – which, ironically enough, was legislative inducement for the sentence reduction that put Wendell Callahan on the street – he opposed last year’s Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, a bill that would have made the shorter crack sentences that the FSA approved in 2010 retroactive, reduced other drug penalties, tightened the standards for mandatory minimum enhancements for guns and career crime, and broadened the criteria for the “safety valve” that lets some drug offenders escape mandatory minimums.

So Congress has yet to propose any bipartisan sentencing reform. Given Trump’s pledge to stop the carnage, as well as the untimely demise of the recently commuted Mr. Thomas, expect nothing.

Gov Track (Jan. 22, 2017)

Reason.com, In Sentencing, Tough Is Not Necessarily Smart (Jan. 25, 2017)

The Saginaw News, Ex-gang member ‘executed’ after Obama commutes sentence (Jan. 24, 2017)

– Thomas L. Root

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New Congress, New Sentence Reform Efforts – Update for January 4, 2017

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

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CRIMINAL JUSTICE AT THE DAWN OF A NEW CONGRESS

The 115th Congress opened yesterday, beginning another 2-year effort to pass some meaningful sentencing reform. And already, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has promised to renew his efforts to pass a bill.

corrections160314Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Grassley plans to take up legislation to revamp U.S. sentencing laws and reform prisons soon after his panel clears the high-profile nominations from Donald Trump. A similar measure passed his committee overwhelmingly last year before stalling out in the face of opposition from law-and-order conservatives.

 Grassley told Politico he will soon try again:
 

The committee will begin the year working through the attorney general and Supreme Court nominees, but criminal justice reform will be one of the legislative bills I plan to bring up early on,” he said in a statement. “It cleared the committee with a broad bipartisan majority in the last Congress, and I don’t expect that to change.

Grassley said he and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), will continue to try to line up support for a sentencing reform measure, while trying to convince the Trump administration of the need for the reforms.  Politico said the new legislation isn’t expected to be substantially different than last year’s version.

As the new Congress opens, here’s the status of federal criminal justice

The number of people in American prisons and jails at the end of 2015 fell by more than 2% after rising slightly in 2014, according to numbers released last week by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The total is 2,173,800, the lowest since 2004.

The jail and prison population shrank by 51,300 last year. State prisons accounted for 42% of that drop, followed by local jails (31 %) and federal prisons (27%). Drug offenders accounted for half of federal prisoners and 16 percent of state prisoners in 2015. The decrease in the federal prison population was largely due to shorter crack sentences authorized by the Fair Sentencing Act. President Obama only granted 163 commutations in 2015, accounting for a tiny share of the decrease.

statistics170104Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts delivered his annual state of the judiciary report last Friday. He reported a 15% increase in appeals filings, driven by an 18% increase in pro se filings. Pro se appeals, almost all from prisoners, account for half of all appeals cases. In the district courts, Roberts said, cases with the government as defendant increased 55% as a result of 2255s filed in response to Welch v. United States and Johnson v. United States.

Also last week, Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) took issue with Obama’s commutation program, arguing that presidential clemency makes it tougher to assemble a consensus for meaningful reform.

Politically, Cornyn may be right, but clemency and legislative reform shouldn’t be at odds. As the second most powerful man in the Senate with a Republican president about to take office, Cornyn has a chance to make sentencing reform a priority when the new 115th Congress convenes next month.

Cornyn has been a driving force behind recently-enacted laws to reduce nationwide rape kit backlog, improve crime victims’ rights, prosecute human trafficking and treat mental illness among inmates. Last week, the Dallas Morning News urged Cornyn to take the lead on sentencing reform again in the new Congress.

prosmis160627Yesterday, The Hill called for reform of the grand jury process to rein in prosecutorial overreach; changes in  mandatory minimum sentences and increased use of the “safety valve”;  increase prison rehabilitation efforts; make changes to remove the stigma of a felony conviction once an offender is released; and dramatically scale back the federal criminal code and ensure that all criminal laws have adequate criminal intent, also known as “mens rea.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, 2016 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary (Dec. 31, 2016)

Dallas Morning News, Cornyn has an opportunity to comprehensively reform the federal criminal justice system (Dec. 29, 2016)

Politico, Senators plan to revive sentencing reform push (Jan. 4, 2017)

The Hill, Criminal justice reform is ripe for bipartisan achievement (Jan. 3, 2017)

– Thomas L. Root

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