IHateAshcroft, too
Attorney General John Ashcroft is compiling a new watch list, but this one doesn’t name terrorists. It’s for judges who don’t follow federal sentencing minimums.
An Ashcroft memo, as reported by the AP, directs prosecutors to report back to the mothership whenever a judge makes “a ‘downward departure’ from guidelines.”
At first blush, this seems to make some sense: shouldn’t federal crimes be sentenced consistently? As spokesman Mark Corallo puts it: “It is an effort to make sure that someone who is convicted of a crime in California is treated no differently than a person who is convicted of the exact same crime in Massachusetts.”
Why then is no less a legal luminary than Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist writing to the Senate Judiciary Committee that reporting actions “would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and reasonable sentences”?
The answer is that legislators are not judges. The judge hears the evidence, sees the circumstances, and makes a decision from far more information than just a Congress-created table listing crimes and punishments. (Even the creators of the “table,” the U.S. Sentencing Commission, opposed the legislation that Ashcroft is now implementing.)
Just another reason to vote ABBA*.
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* Anyone But Bush Again.