REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Sentenced to Confusion
The Supreme Court couldn't leave well enough alone.
The Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Wednesday. And if you thought things were confusing before, just wait. About 60,000 criminals are sentenced in federal court each year, and the process will now be more bewildering than ever.
Better legal minds than ours are describing the reasoning behind this fractured pair of 5-4 judgments as "weird," "bizarre" or (our favorite for understatement) "intellectually complicated." The bottom line is that the Court decreed that the guidelines enacted by Congress 21 years ago must be considered as merely advisory, not mandatory. Judges are no longer bound to impose sentences within the ranges set by Congress.
In evaluating the Court's ruling, it helps to remember why Congress passed the 1984 sentencing guidelines in the first place. It was an effort to impose some kind of discipline on a system that was full of disparities and which an ever larger share of the American public saw as too lenient on criminals. It wasn't unusual for a person convicted of a crime in one jurisdiction to receive a sentence years or even decades longer than someone convicted of the same crime in a more liberal one. It all depended on the disposition, not to say whim, of the judges wielding the gavels.
While Wednesday's ruling restores considerable discretion to judges, it won't take the sentencing system back in time to pre-1984--despite what some critics are claiming. For one thing, the same legislation in which Congress mandated the sentencing guidelines also abolished the parole system, which often put criminals back out on the streets after serving just a brief time in jail. Unlike 21 years ago, a criminal handed a 10-year sentence today is likely to serve something close to that amount of time. Also, in recent years Congress has set mandatory minimum sentences for a wide range of crimes, and these remain unaffected by this week's ruling.
At the same time, the ruling clearly gives judges more wiggle room, and sentences are bound to vary depending on how closely a judge decides to adhere to the guidelines. Many judges will probably feel honor bound to stick to the guidelines, and disputed sentences will be reviewed by the federal appeals courts, which are told to use a "reasonableness" standard. But this is hardly a guarantee of even-handedness. A sentence deemed "reasonable" by the Second Circuit in New York could be viewed as lenient by the conservative Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, or severe by liberals on the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco.
Judges have never liked the guidelines, which from their perspective amount to 1,800 pages of Congressional micromanagement. But somehow we think they're going to like what's coming even less. Congress is not about to sit still and accept what it sees as a power grab by the judiciary.
Hearings on the guidelines are already being discussed, and legislation could follow apace. One quick fix would be for Congress to expand the number of mandatory minimum sentences, a solution that would have the ironic effect of giving judges less flexibility in sentencing than they had before Wednesday's ruling.
It didn't have to come to this. The Federal Sentencing Guidelines weren't perfect, but they struck roughly the right balance among judicial discretion, Congressional oversight and jury responsibility. The guidelines deserve at least part of the credit for the lower crime rate the country is currently enjoying. (See the nearby charts.) With more criminals--especially recidivists--behind bars, the rate of violent crime is now at a 30-year low. This is precisely the outcome that Congress intended when it responded to public outrage over crime by passing the guidelines.
Even the Supreme Court ruling says "the ball is now in Congress' court," which may not be such a bad thing. A national debate on the correlation between prison sentences and crime would be instructive. Some tinkering with the sentencing guidelines is overdue, and Congress might even have a good idea or two, especially as compared with this fractured Supreme Court.
