Doug Berman’s remarkable Sentencing Law and Policy blog notes another key sentencing decision from U.S. District Judge William G. Young of Massachusetts, the jurist who declared the federal sentencing guidelines unconstitutional a few months before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Booker decision. In this well-reasoned 125-page decision, Judge Young concludes that the existing sentencing scheme is unworkable in theory or in reality. “Juries can and should perform” sentencing “as a matter both of practice and of constitutional procedure,” Judge Young reasons. He begins his treatise by hammering home a point that has been made continually on this blog during the Justice Department’s dubious criminalization of business interests in the post-Enron era — i.e., the enormous cost of such criminalization:
For seventeen years federal courts had been sentencing offenders unconstitutionally. Think about that. The human cost is incalculable — thousands of Americans languish in prison under sentences that today are unconstitutional. The institutional costs are equally enormous — for seventeen years the American jury was disparaged and disregarded in derogation of its constitutional function; a generation of federal trial judges has lost track of certain core values of an independent judiciary because they have been brought up in a sentencing system that strips the words “burden of proof”, “evidence”, and “facts” of genuine meaning; and the vulnerability of our fair and impartial federal trial court system to attack from the political branches of our government has been exposed as never before in our history.
