Above: The Supreme Court of the United States/Photo: Wikimedia

The US Sentencing Commission helped send more people to prison for longer terms. It’s a shame it was created to address a non-existent crisis. Here’s how the SC got misled

~By Ryan Gabrielson

More than 30 years ago, Congress identified what it said was a grave threat to the American promise of equal justice for all: Federal judges were giving wildly different punishments to defendants who had committed the same crimes.

The worries were many. Some lawmakers feared lenient judges were giving criminals too little time in prison. Others suspected African-American defendants were being unfairly sentenced to steeper prison terms than white defendants.

In 1984, Congress created the US Sentencing Commission with remarkable bipartisan support. The commission would set firm punishment rules, called “guidelines”, for every offence. The measure, signed by President Ronald Reagan, largely stripped federal judges of their sentencing powers; they were now to use a chart to decide penalties for each conviction…

Five years later, a legal challenge to the Sentencing Commission wound up before the US Supreme Court. In a case titled Mistretta vs US, the court was asked to consider whether Congress had overreached by taking on what seemed to be a role for the judiciary. In an 8-1 decision, the justices determined that the Sentencing Commission was constitutional. And they took care to say that the commission was also needed—to end the widespread and “shameful” sentencing disparities produced by the biases of individual judges.

Mistretta was a momentous decision, but it’s now clear the high court relied on evidence that was flimsy and even flat-out wrong.

The justices, in issuing the 1989 decision, had cited a single congressional report in concluding that there were disturbing and unacceptable sentencing disparities that needed to be addressed. That single report, in turn, was based primarily on two studies conducted in the early 1970s, both deeply flawed.

One of the studies was an experiment that surveyed federal judges about sentences they might give in hypothetical cases. Asked what sentences they would give in a specific tax fraud case, for example, the prison terms recommended by the judges ranged from three to 20 years.

That sounds significant. But the experiment ignored a basic fact about the real-life workings of the federal courts: Judges acted as the sole arbiter of sentences in a tiny fraction of cases. The vast majority of sentences were the result of plea bargains negotiated by prosecutors and defence lawyers, deals that were subject to a judge’s approval but that were not his or her handiwork. In fact, there was no evidence offered that judges around the country were signing off on vastly different plea bargain terms. And later research would debunk the claim.

The other study compared average sentences in federal district courts and indicated prison terms for identical crimes were often years longer or shorter depending on where judges presided. But an examination by ProPublica shows that the study was riddled with sample size errors that should have rendered much of the data unusable.

For example, the study said the average prison term for larceny in federal courts nationwide was three years and four months. In Maine, the average was  12 years, more than three times as harsh. Our examination of the underlying data shows that only one person was sentenced to prison for larceny in Maine’s lone federal court that year…

The study—done for a Senate committee working on sentencing reform and using data from the Administrative Office of the US Courts—was also distorted by an outright mistake. The study claimed Kentucky’s eastern district court sentenced burglary convicts to, on average, nearly 14 years in prison in 1972, which appears remarkably punitive for a property crime and out of whack with courts in the rest of the country. The study’s data, not the judges, was the problem, it turns out.

ProPublica’s review shows Kentucky’s eastern district had only four prison sentences for burglary that year. Three of the convicts were adults who received an average prison term of three years and four months. The fourth case involved a juvenile defendant supposedly sentenced to 550 months—more than 45 years—in a cell. The maximum sentence for burglary was 15 years, making that an impossibility, but the mistake wound up in the report that helped shape the thinking of the nation’s highest court. Court officials in Kentucky told ProPublica they could not determine what the juvenile’s sentence had actually been…

Yet ample scholarship done over 30 years has only made clearer that the central rationale for the commission’s creation—large and pervasive discrepancies in sentencing imposed by judges—never existed.

Multiple sophisticated analyses of court data have found that judges, when left to deliver sentences on their own, do not differ greatly. Before the guidelines took effect, the average difference between judges was roughly five to eight months—not years, as the congressional report claimed and the nation’s highest court believed. After the guidelines were instituted, additional analysis has shown, the difference between sentences shrank by roughly a month.

Today, the Sentencing Commission’s guidelines are merely “advisory,” not mandatory, as a result of several subsequent Supreme Court decisions involving whether aspects of the guidelines violated a defendant’s right to trial…

ProPublica unearthed hundreds of pages containing four-decades-old federal courts data to test the sentencing averages study. It appears to be the first time the research has been rigorously checked.

The study’s first criminal category— homicide and assault—is so riddled with sample size flaws, its figures are useless. Averages for the Maryland and New Jersey judges are based on two cases in each case. (State courts generally handle violent crimes so it makes sense that federal courts did not hand out many such sentences.)

While the Supreme Court’s Mistretta opinion and lawmakers repeatedly said that judges’ sentencing disparities could not be explained by defendants’ criminal histories, the analyses of federal data they depended on did not address the question.

The congressional report singled out the Illinois northern district court as unjustifiably lenient on robbery convicts; it averaged prison terms of less than seven years in 1972 compared to the national average of 10 years.

But it turns out robbery convicts in the Illinois court were a lot different than those across the country. A majority had no criminal history at all, and only 28 percent had previously served time in prison. Nationwide, most federal robbery convicts had substantial criminal histories, and 50 percent of them had served prison time.

Further illustrating the point, judges in the Missouri eastern district averaged 15-year prison sentences for robbery, several years longer than the national average. But 85 percent of that court’s convicts had been in prison before. The underlying data suggests that defendants with bad criminal histories often received longer prison sentences.

The sentencing guidelines took effect in November 1987. One month later, John Mistretta was indicted on drug trafficking charges in Missouri, for which he pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and received 18 months in prison… He appealed his punishment, arguing that the commission and its work violated the separation of powers required in the Constitution.

Lawyers for the federal government defending the guidelines provided the congressional report, containing the judge experiment and district sentencing averages, to the Supreme Court. The case centred on legal arguments, not questions about the statistical evidence.

Rather, the justices and lawyers treated the crisis of sentencing judges as established fact. “Congress wanted to fetter the power that individual judges had been exercising, because they are the ones who created the problem,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said during oral arguments in Mistretta. “They are the ones who gave the disparate sentences all around the country.”

Paul Bator, who represented the sentencing commission, described federal judges’ control of criminal punishment as being “very ugly days of discriminatory and arbitrary sentencing”.

In the majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun referred to sentencing disparities among judges as “a serious impediment to an evenhanded and effective operation of the criminal justice system”.

The consequences of the court’s ruling were considerable and have helped fuel sharp debates about issues such as mass incarceration.

In 1984, the average prison term handed down by federal courts was two years. That more than doubled over the decade that followed, according to figures from the Sentencing Commission. About half of federal convicts received probation when judges controlled most of the sentencing. Only 7 percent got probation last year.

Stith, the Yale professor, said the Sentencing Commission’s guidelines came to include sentencing “enhancements”, such as whether a defendant attempted to destroy evidence or had access to a weapon. They became a major part of the new punishment formula and lengthened sentences….

But the creation and legal endorsement of the commission preceded a variety of developments that led to harsher penalties in court. Congress, for instance, made the punishment for crack cocaine 100 times more severe than for powder cocaine. In 1985, the federal prison population consisted of just over 40,000 inmates, according to US Bureau of Prisons data. During the decade that followed, with fixed prison sentences and tough anti-drug laws, the prison rolls grew by 150 percent and topped 100,000 inmates in 1995…

Drug prosecutions, in the end, produced their own set of disparities—disproportionate numbers of minority defendants. In 1996, 73 percent of those convicted for drug trafficking were black or Hispanic, roughly triple their share of the nation’s population. Researchers had struggled for decades to demonstrate racial disparities in federal sentencing. Suddenly, the gaps were glaring and repeatedly proven.

Indeed, sentencing disparities by race remain prevalent as ever, according to an analysis the commission released last month. Black men’s prison terms the past two years were 19 percent longer, on average, than those received by white men, the study shows. The difference cannot be explained by the crimes or the defendants’ criminal histories. The Sentencing Commission says there is no sign the racial gap for incarceration is getting smaller.                                                                                                                                                 

 —Courtesy ProPublica