by Kent Scheidegger · Oct 21, 2020 10:59 am
Tessa McLean reports in the SF Chronicle:
Another Walgreens is permanently shutting down in San Francisco.
The drugstore at 790 Van Ness Ave. had been dealing with rampant shoplifting, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, amounting to up to $1,000 in lost merchandise every day. Thefts were often brazen and carried out in broad daylight. Continue reading . . .
by Bill Otis · Sep 14, 2020 5:45 pm
Judge Amul Thapar is one of many excellent appointments President Trump has made to the federal courts of appeals. He showed it again in his opinion today for a unanimous Sixth Circuit panel that reversed, and removed from the case, a district judge disinclined to follow established law. The subtitle of Judge Thapar’s work could easily be, “Being A Judge Is A Job Not An Anointment.”
by Bill Otis · Sep 12, 2020 8:40 am
A recent article featured on Sentencing Law and Policy reminded me of why my first career was with the Justice Department and I came to legal academia only later. The gist of the article — written by a law professor and appearing in SSRN — is that drug sentencing is a product of an ignorant electorate’s “moral panic,” and that the Supreme Court should rein in us wahoos by deciding for us what drug sentencing should be.
by Bill Otis · Aug 17, 2020 3:03 pm
I wish this were from the Onion. It isn’t. It’s from what “criminal justice reform” has in mind for you:
John Weed was enjoying the Frederick County, Maryland, Fair last September when a group of teens surrounded him and beat him to death. One of the two brothers involved who later spat on Weed’s lifeless body has now been sentenced by the judge. Did he get the death penalty, which is what Weed suffered in front of his own family in broad daylight at a rural county fair? Nope, he was told to report to anger management class. Welcome to justice in America.
Not that the problem here was anger, for that matter. The problem was sadism, very likely with a helping of the racist resentment the mainstream media never tires of spouting. Read the whole story if you have the stomach for it.
by Bill Otis · Aug 3, 2020 1:45 pm
I spent a good chunk of my career at the Justice Department and my life afterwards speaking up for a sentencing system that more nearly resembles law than the “anything-goes” regimen that existed when I started my career. At that time, with limited exceptions, judges were free to sentence as they chose within any point in a very broad statutory range, pretty much with no questions asked. This led to scandalously wide and irrational disparity. In the Eighties, Congress noticed, and responded with one of its signal achievements, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. The SRA established the Sentencing Commission and a system of mandatory sentencing guidelines, with departures allowed in exceptional cases, for good reason explained by the court on the record.
One of the main criticisms I encountered was that the SRA system was too rigid and took the human element out of sentencing. We should “let judges be judges,” or so I was told. I now see, however, that the adversaries of law-driven sentencing have had at least a modest change of heart.
by Bill Otis · Jul 23, 2020 5:59 pm
Underincarceration and the drumbeat for “sentencing reform” that lies behind it are the catalysts for tragic and avoidable murder. No humane society should tolerate such a thing, but ours does, routinely, simply to genuflect to demands by criminals and their swooning spokesmen to treat them as if our behavior were the problem, not theirs.
This is false, foolish, immoral, and lethal. Here’s the latest example.
by Michael Rushford · Jul 22, 2020 3:54 pm
Over the past several years real law enforcement leaders, not appointed chiefs in liberal cities or George Soros-funded DAs, have been warning that giving in to demands by Black Lives Matter and progressive politicians for sentencing and policing reforms would result in more crime. President Barack Obama used his pen to begin these reforms, releasing thousands of drug dealers from prison, backing off federal prosecution of dealers for new crimes, implementing “catch and release” on our southern border and initiating federal consent decrees to handcuff police in big cities like Chicago, supposedly to reduce racially-biased policing. By 2019, many of the most populous states had adopted some form of sentencing reform, cutting sentencing for most crimes, shortening or eliminating enhancements for repeat felons and reducing or eliminating bail. In the face of intense pressure by local politicians, activist groups and a complicit media, Police departments have backed away from progressive policing, particularly in minority urban areas.
by Bill Otis · Jul 16, 2020 10:49 pm
“Sentencing reform” is the intentionally opaque phrase given to abbreviated sentences and early release handed out to felons, often repeat drug pushers. The mantra is that “sentencing reform” restores families and returns renewed and productive men to the community.
That might be right every now and again. Certainly it’s all the reformers are willing to talk about. But a steadfast refusal to look at the costs of early release is as dishonest as it is dangerous. Hence this story from the New York Daily News: “Three men — longtime partners in crime — charged with gunning down dad in front of his young daughter in Bronx drive-by.”
by Bill Otis · Jul 10, 2020 7:05 pm
The President today commuted Roger Stone’s 40-month prison sentence, which he was to start serving shortly. As I noted in my earlier post on the Stone sentencing, Mr. Stone seemed to me to be a lifelong blowhard and bully. He was convicted on ample evidence of witness tampering. The line prosecutors (members of the Mueller team) recommended a sentence of seven to nine years. Their superiors at DOJ thought that excessive, and changed the recommendation to roughly three to four years. The sentencing judge, an Obama appointee, apparently agreed with the superseding, more lenient recommendation.
There was much debate about whether the lighter recommendation was merely political genuflection to the President’s wishes, or was instead, and as I believe, justified on the merits of the Department’s assessment of the Sentencing Guidelines. But that debate will seem tame compared to the one about to begin about today’s commutation.
by Katherine.Stiplosek · Jul 9, 2020 2:18 pm
Last month, the Public Policy Institute of California released a report, entitled “Proposition 47’s Impact on Racial Disparity in Criminal Justice Outcomes”.
The report examines Proposition 47, “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act”, which implemented three broad changes to felony sentencing laws. First, it reclassified certain theft and drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, including shoplifting, forgery, insufficient funds, petty theft, receiving stolen property, and petty theft with a prior. The proposition also reclassified drug possession under Health and Safety Code sections 11350, 11357(a) , and 11377 as strictly misdemeanors. (As with the aforementioned theft offenses, these new misdemeanor rules do not apply to individuals who one or more prior offenses (specified under Penal Code section 667(e)(2)(C)(iv).)
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