FORMULAS FOR INJUSTICE

Supreme Court justices are bitterly split on crucial matters of law, and
judges on some appeals courts seem to have adopted insults of each other
instead of footnotes of precedents as their preferred mode of disputation.

But on one issue, the nation's fractious federal judiciary stands united:
Congress is flat wrong to destroy one of the lynchpins of American justice
- - respect for the individual - and to replace it with politically dictated,
Washington-decreed, one-size-fits-all punishments.

The 27-member Judicial Conference, headed by Chief Justice William
Rehnquist, voted unanimously last week to ask Congress to repeal its
misguided decision to curb further the already limited discretion that
judges have in imposing sentences.

Far worse than any of the bureaucrats they deride, the conservative
absolutists behind this bad idea (most prominently, Attorney General John
Ashcroft) are attempting to reduce human beings to ciphers on a chart and
to impose sentences according to a rigidly mechanistic point system of
vengeance. Further, they want to serve up as political footballs the names
of any judges who deviate from their inhumane calculus.

They are seeking to throw out the very symbol of American justice - the
balancing of the scales - and to eliminate the very essence of judges' duty
- - exercising judgment.

The federal sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum sentences already
in effect produce so many mindless cruelties that federal judges, from the
right and the left, have been complaining for years. Yet only rarely do
they deviate from them, and almost always for compelling reasons.

But neither their record nor their individual pleas for fairness have made
a difference. The Judicial Conference's vigorous and unanimous protest of
Congress' latest usurpation should.

The world rejoiced last week when Nigerian judges spared a woman from the
mandatory sentence of death by stoning. Shouldn't America's judges, when
individual cases warrant, have like ability to dispense justice instead of
exacting blind vengeance?