U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE IN UTAH BLASTS BUSH ADMINISTRATION PUSH FOR
'ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL JUSTICE'

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is trying to roll back a Supreme
Court decision by pushing legislation that would require prison time
for nearly all criminals.

The Justice Department is offering the plan as an opening salvo in a
larger debate about whether sentences for crack cocaine are unfairly
harsh and racially discriminatory.

Republicans are seizing the administration's crackdown, packaged in
legislation to combat violent crime, as a campaign issue for 2008.

In a speech June 1 to announce the bill, Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales urged Congress to re-impose mandatory minimum prison
sentences against federal convicts - and not let judges consider such
penalties "merely a suggestion."

Such an overhaul, in part, "will strengthen our hand in fighting
criminals who threaten the safety and security of all Americans,"
Gonzales said in the speech, delivered three days before the FBI
announced a slight national uptick in violent crime during 2006.

Judges, however, were livid over the proposal to limit their power.

"This would require one-size-fits-all justice," said U.S. District
Judge Paul G. Cassell, chairman of the Criminal Law committee of the
Judicial Conference, the judicial branch's policy-making body.

"The vast majority of the public would like the judges
to make the individualized decisions needed to make these very
difficult sentencing decisions," Cassell said. "Judges are
the ones who look the defendants in the eyes. They hear from the
victims. They hear from the prosecutors."

The debate, pitting prosecutors against jurists, has been ongoing
since a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that declared the government's two
decades-old sentencing guidelines unconstitutional. The ruling in
United States v. Booker said judges are not required to abide by the
federal guidelines - which set mandatory minimum and maximums on
sentences - but could consider them in meting out prison time.

The Justice Department wants to return to the old system of mandatory
minimum sentences, under which judges could grant leniency only in
special cases. Without those required floors, Justice officials
maintain that different judges could hand out widely varying
penalties for the same crime.

Justice officials also point to a growing number of lighter sentences
as possible proof that crime is on the rise because criminals are no
longer cowed by strict penalties.

In the two years since the ruling, federal judges have become three
times more likely to hand down prison sentences below the suggested
levels, according to 2006 U.S. Sentencing Commission data. In 2005,
before the Booker case, those penalties represented 4.3 percent of
all sentences imposed. That number rose to 13 percent after the
Supreme Court ruling and dipped to 12.1 percent in 2006, the data show.

Still, Justice officials privately concede that returning to the
sentencing guidelines as required minimums is a long-shot at best. At
the least, they say, their proposal marks a first step toward
ratcheting back a counter-push by courts to lower penalties for
first-time crack cocaine convictions.

This week, the Supreme Court waded into the racially sensitive
dispute, agreeing to consider whether courts can give defendants
similar sentences for crack cocaine crimes as for cocaine powder.
Crack crimes usually garner much tougher penalties, and most crack
cocaine offenders in federal courts are black.

"I don't think they in a million years think it's going to pass
anytime soon," said Douglas Berman, an Ohio State University
sentencing expert. "But they've gotten more extra mileage out of
threatening this, framing the debate of sentencing reform." "Of
course this is politics," Berman said. Republicans eager to embrace a
tough-on-crime stance as the 2008 election year approaches are
demanding that mandatory minimum penalties be put back in place.
"Without sentencing guidelines, we are back to unfair sentences and
more violent crime," said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, top Republican
on the House Judiciary Committee. "Congress has a responsibility to
ensure tough penalties for violent offenders and restore the basic
principle that all people are treated equally under the law."
Washington defense attorney Michael Horowitz, a U.S. Sentencing
Commission member and a former criminal division official at the
Justice Department, said the proposed overhaul will "have some appeal
in an election year." But Gonzales, dogged by scandals ranging from
fired U.S. attorneys to FBI privacy intrusions, is unlikely to
persuade an already skeptical Congress to adopt his plan.

"With all the issues in the Judiciary Committee right now, it's going
to be tough to get traction on this," Horowitz said.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., dismissed
the plan as misguided. Without Leahy's support, the Justice
Department's sentencing plan is unlikely to become law as long as
Democrats control the Senate.

The Bush administration should be spending more money on local police
to battle crime rather than proposing a "large-scale and premature
overhaul of our sentencing system," Leahy said.