WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 — The Justice Department told a federal court administrator today that it would begin compiling data on judges who give lighter sentences than federal guidelines prescribe, a move that critics see as an effort to limit judicial independence by creating a "blacklist" of judges.
The new policy will require prosecutors to notify Justice Department officials in Washington whenever a federal judge issues a sentence that falls below sentencing guidelines. The notification will set in motion a review of whether an appeal of the judge's sentence should be filed.
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Some lawmakers, judges and legal observers, however, said they were deeply troubled by the shift.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, accused Mr. Ashcroft of requiring prosecutors "to participate in the establishment of a blacklist of judges." He called the policy "the latest salvo in the Ashcroft Justice Department's ongoing attack on judicial independence and fairness" in sentencing.
John S. Martin, a federal district judge in Manhattan who announced in June that he would retire in part because he saw the judiciary's independence as threatened, said the Justice Department policy was "based on the erroneous premise that a lot of judges around the county are just going off the reservation."
He added: "The problem is that a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington looking at the statistics won't know the facts of these cases. They're taking a very mechanistic approach to the whole process."
Nicholas M. Gess, a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, said the policy fit a pattern in the Ashcroft Justice Department of centralizing decision-making in Washington, a trend also seen in death penalty cases.
I don’t have time to go into this full now, but mandatory sentencing guidelines and regulations of that ilk are an abomination of the law. Much as we would like to think so, legal punishments are not uniform, nor should they be. The fair application of justice requires that a judge have and use discretion when sentencing criminals. There was an op-ed by a federal court judge this summer (which, regretably, I didn't link) in the NYT that said he was retiring precisely because of these overly stringent, and, yes, unjust sentencing guidelines. A judge is not required to throw the proverbial book at every drug user and low level skell that enters his courtroom, and these Justice Department regulations are an attempt to force judges to do just that
Posted by mike at August 8, 2003 01:30 PM