HIGH COURT PUTS JUDGE BACK IN JUDGMENT

My goodness, look at that, the Supreme Court put the judge back in
judgment. It was about time.

Cookie-cutter sentencing may have been well-intentioned when it first slid
through Congress with bipartisan support 21 years ago as an attempt to make
sentencing more consistent from one part of the country to another.

But instead, as tough-on-crime proponents hither and yon ladled on
enhancers and prosecutors added multiple charges to buoy the behind-bars
totals, what the nation got, instead, was an out-of-whack assembly line
system where judges with good judgment were sometimes reduced to apologies
as they handed down sentences they knew were patently unfair.

Reason came back to the bench last week when the U.S. Supreme Court issued
a two-part ruling that made the congressional sentencing guidelines
advisory - not mandatory as they had been treated for two decades. In the
first part, the high court held 5-4 that the sentencing system violated
defendant's rights to trial by jury because it gave judges the power to
increase sentences beyond the maximum that the jury's findings alone would
have merited.

In the second part, the high-court judges imposed their remedy - they said
the standards were therefore discretionary and not mandatory and they only
had to withstand a test of reasonableness.

While that all seems like a reasonable thing, make no mistake about it,
this case was about more than that, it was about power over punishment and
which branch of government should wield it - Congress and the legislative
branch or the judicial branch.

Even when the "guidelines" were considered mandatory, members of Congress,
usually in the House, complained that judges were not following them
adequately and there were proposals afoot to require sentencing reports
that tallied such non-compliance.

We don't expect we have heard the last on this controversial topic, despite
last week's ruling.

But rather than have Congress rush to impose a new system of mandatory
sentencing on the bench, we would hope that they would simply monitor
sentencing for consistency and reasonableness.

The final determination on sentencing, it would seem to us, is best made by
those who have sat in the courtroom and heard the facts of the case and all
its nuances - not by a congressman sitting on the banks of the Potomac who
wants it reduced to a guilty or not guilty that determines a set number of
years behind bars.