PRISON SENTENCES IN S. ILLINOIS ARE CALLED NATION'S LONGEST

High volume of drug crimes is a contributor, judge says

In the same winsome drawl that sometimes sends criminals off to prison with
a little homespun advice, the chief federal judge for Southern Illinois set
out to explain why sentences in his district are rated as the nation's longest.

"East St. Louis is at the confluence of several major interstate highways,
conduits for drug trafficking," said U.S. District Judge G. Patrick Murphy.

It was Murphy's opening line in an intricate accounting that ranged from
the district's high volume of penalty-heavy drug crimes to the conservative
appellate judges in Chicago who look over his trial judges' shoulders.

The explanations may be complicated, but the statistics driving the
question are not: A judicial watchdog group calculates that the Southern
District of Illinois has delivered the most severe federal sentences, on
average, for each of the past three years.

The average sentence for felons in court at East St. Louis was twice as
high as at the Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse, within sight just across
the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis.

It does not necessarily mean that a criminal would get twice as much time
for the same crime under the same circumstances. But when all sentences are
averaged, Southern Illinois is unsurpassed.

Using data provided by federal prosecutors, a Syracuse University group
calculated that Southern Illinois led the system in average sentence length
for the past three years, and in median sentence length for the past two.
The group released its figures for 2002, which apply to only federal
courts, earlier this year.

According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, at Syracuse,
the average prison sentence in Southern Illinois in 2002 was 107 months, or
slightly less than nine years. The national average was 43 months. In
Eastern Missouri, it was 48 months.

Looking to a different set of numbers, the U.S. Sentencing Commission put
Southern Illinois first in median sentences and a close second in average
sentence length for 2001. The commission, whose reports lag behind TRAC's,
uses data from courts, not prosecutors.

The differences between the reports are attributable to the methods used to
make calculations, Syracuse professor Susan Long said.

Southern Illinois prosecutors aren't crowing, and criminal defense lawyers
aren't complaining. At least not publicly. But the figures are raising some
eyebrows.

"It's nothing to be proud of," said criminal defense lawyer John Stobbs,
whose office is in East Alton. He said long sentences themselves do not
represent justice. Based on his own observations, Stobbs said he believes
the trend has peaked and may be on the way down.

While nobody is able to provide a single, definitive explanation, drug
charges seem to play a major role.

According to the Sentencing Commission, drug cases made up 66.4 percent of
the Southern Illinois district's criminal cases in 2001. Nowhere else was
there a comparable proportion of drug crimes, which draw heavy penalties.
Only a few districts had a drug docket above 50 percent.

Said Judge Murphy: "Geographically, we don't have much suburban area. We
have the white world of methamphetamine and the black world of crack
cocaine." The district is made up of Illinois' southernmost 38 counties,
with about 1.26 million residents.

Mark Carallo, spokesman for the Justice Department, cautioned against
reading too much meaning into statistics. "It might mean there are more
drug crimes being committed there per capita," Carallo said. "The types of
cases filed by each office are dictated by the priorities set by the U.S.
attorney."

The U.S. attorney who sets the priorities for Southern Illinois, Miriam
Miquelon, declined to comment for this story.

Guidelines from 1986

The conventional wisdom is that handling lots of drug cases pushes the
average sentence lengths up. That's also the opinion of Richard Parsons,
the federal public defender for the Central District of Illinois, in Peoria.

"The crack cocaine guidelines are Draconian," he said.

The guidelines Parsons mentioned were enacted by Congress in 1986 to impose
consistency among federal trial judges in the sentences they issue. The
rules take a variety of factors into account, including the nature of the
crime, the defendant's criminal record, whether a firearm was used and much
more.

Since there are guidelines, it would seem that Southern Illinois should be
in line when its drug dealers' sentences are compared to those of similar
criminals in other districts. But it's not. In 2001, the average drug
dealer sentenced in the East St. Louis court received nearly twice as much
prison time as one in St. Louis, where penalties were still above the
national average.

To account for that, Southern Illinois judges suggest that they must be
following the sentencing rules more closely.

Or perhaps part of the statistical disparity is an illusion, created by the
way judges account for time off a sentence granted to defendants who
cooperate in nailing their accomplices.

One method is called a "downward departure" from the usual guidelines and
is applied when the sentence is handed down.

In Arizona in 2001, 60 percent of criminal defendants got one. In many
districts the figure was over half. In Eastern Missouri the figure was 27
percent. But in Southern Illinois, it was only 15 percent.

The reason, Murphy suggested, is that the appellate court judges in his
circuit are very conservative and don't like to approve of the time off.
But Parsons, the Central Illinois public defender, objects to that premise.
He notes that the same 7th Circuit Court of Appeals also presides over the
rest of Illinois, as well as Indiana and Wisconsin.

"I don't think that's the problem," Parsons said. "As long as the judge
enumerates his valid reasons for a downward departure, the 7th Circuit is
not going to reverse it."

He noted that in his own district, nearly 47 percent of defendants got
downward departures.

But while "downward departures" are scarce in Southern Illinois, eventual
sentence reductions are not. Common practice is for a defendant to get the
full sentence at first. Prosecutors wait and see if the defendant provides
promised testimony against others later. If so, the U.S. attorney goes back
to a judge to recommend a revised, lower sentence.

The process can knock a third or more off a prison term. Prosecutors
everywhere do it. But nobody knows whether Southern Illinois does more of
it than other districts, because nobody tracks it nationally.

While the practice might tend to inflate the reported sentencing
statistics, it does not seem likely to account for the whole disparity.

Whether the region's federal prison time remains high may depend on whether
authorities pursue a greater diversity of crimes, most of which carry
lighter sentences than drug trafficking.

"The U.S. attorney has said she is going to prosecute more white collar
cases, and I commend her for that," Judge Murphy said of Miquelon.

Stobbs, the defense lawyer, said Miquelon has recommended that judges
exercise more leeway in reducing sentences.

"I've seen it firsthand," Stobbs said. "I'd be shocked if the next year the
sentences have not dropped significantly."