SENTENCING LAWS NULLIFIED

Federal Judge: Rules Benefit Prosecutors

A federal judge in Boston has ruled that federal sentencing laws are
unconstitutional because they give prosecutors too much power.

In an impassioned 177-page decision released Monday, Judge William
Young described a system in which prosecutors use various strategies
to reward those who plead guilty and to impose harsh sentences on
those who choose to stand trial and lose.

"The focus of our entire criminal justice system has shifted away from
trials and juries and adjudication to a massive system of sentence
bargaining that is heavily rigged against the accused citizen," Young
wrote in a decision reconsidering sentences he imposed on two defendants.

Young, the chief judge of the federal district court in Boston,
acknowledged that similar challenges to the sentencing guidelines have
been rejected by all of the appeals courts that have considered them.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the guidelines
themselves in 1989. But he said more recent Supreme Court cases
support his analysis.

The Supreme Court is considering a similar issue in the context of
Washington state's sentencing laws, with a decision expected soon.

Young said that about 97 percent of all criminal convictions
nationwide are the result of plea bargains. Defendants accused of
federal crimes in Massachusetts who insist on a trial, he added, face
sentences six times as long as those they would receive after a guilty
plea and an agreement to cooperate with prosecutors.

Young cited methods used by prosecutors to encourage defendants to
plead guilty under sentencing guidelines issued by a commission
created by Congress in 1984. They include, he said, "charge
bargaining," in which prosecutors drop selected charges in exchange
for a plea, and "fact bargaining," in which prosecutors turn a blind
eye to evidence, typically guns or drugs, that would require a harsher
sentence.

Michael Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in Boston, said Young's
accusations are not accurate. "We don't do charge or fact bargaining.
You charge based on what the evidence would support and what the law
would allow. You don't overcharge. You charge based on the available
evidence."

Young relied on two recent Supreme Court cases to hold the sentencing
guidelines unconstitutional. The two cases, he said, require that all
facts that increase the punishment to which a defendant is exposed
must be proved to a jury. But sentencing hearings take place before
only judges, and the rules of evidence do not apply.

"Courts today," he wrote, "must base their conclusions on a mishmash
of data including blatantly self-serving hearsay" presented by
prosecutors. The data often include, he wrote, information about
crimes with which the defendants have never been charged and even
crimes of which they have been acquitted.