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Update: Professors of criminology, sociology, public policy, and law write to Congress to address the disparity between crack and powder cocaine mandatory minimums.
Brief
Context of Sentencing Reform in the United States
On
January 12, 2005, the Supreme Court handed down one
of its strangest but most important opinions in many
years, United
States v. Booker, No. 04-104. Justice Stevens,
writing for a five-justice majority, ruled that the
federal sentencing guidelines could no longer be "mandatory."
The system which required judges to find facts that
determined which guidelines to apply was unconstitutional
because it violated the Sixth amendment requirement
of proof beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury. The fact
must be found by a procedure that meets that test or
must be admitted by the defendant.
Then
Justice Breyer, writing for an almost completely different
five justice majority (only Justice Ginsburg joined
both opinions to create a majority for each), outlined
the remedy, which was to hold that only the mandatory
nature of the guidelines was unconstitutional but to
otherwise uphold the sentencing guideline system. With
the guidelines no longer mandatory, the traditional
judicial fact finding that is part of sentencing need
not meet the test of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Each
justice wrote strong dissents from the majority opinion
of the other justice.
Many
federal courts have since issued their interpretations
of Booker. One of the best sources of information about
the current state of federal sentencing is the blog
managed by Ohio State University Law Professor Doug
Berman at http://sentencing.typepad.com.
Booker
was foreshadowed on June 24, 2004 by the Supreme Court's
opinion in Blakely v. Washington that drastically changed
the way defendants are sentenced in state courts. Blakely
cast serious doubt on the constitutionality of the US
Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Click
here to read CJPF Research Assistant Alex Zolan's analysis
in 2004 of Blakely's implications. This paper is
in PDF format, which requires Adobe Acrobat reader to
open.
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