Ashcroft's Power Grows In Terrorist Witch Hunt (Maaatlock!!!!!!)

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General John Ashcroft doesn't have enough to do, hunting down terrorists.

With the help of a rollover Congress, he now has a new and bigger club to go after federal judges who impose lighter sentences in criminal cases than he would like.

As a faithful lord high executioner of the administration's much touted "compassionate conservatism," Ashcroft wants to clamp down on those judges.

At issue are the sentencing guidelines laid down by a federal commission that Congress created in 1984. Under pressure from Ashcroft, Congress voted in April to restrict the flexibility of federal judges to depart from the guidelines.

The new law also makes it easier for prosecutors to appeal more cases when they don't like the court-imposed prison sentences.

As it stands now, the attorney general must report within 15 days to Congress the identity of any federal judge who deviates from the rules and the reasons why. And the department must report within five days whether it intends to appeal.

The empowered attorney general then issued an order on July 28 to federal prosecutors, directing them to report all "downward departure" sentencing decisions in criminal cases.

Previously, the prosecutors were required to report to the Justice Department only those sentences that they had objected to and wanted to appeal.

The overall effect is to give Ashcroft more control and the final say on whether to appeal a sentence. And it reduces the powers of the prosecutors in the field, the people who know more about the defendant and the circumstances of the case than does anyone in Washington.

It looks to me as if Ashcroft has designed a new program to intimidate federal judges.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., accused Ashcroft of an "ongoing attack on judicial independence" and said he was requiring federal prosecutors to establish a "black list" of judges who diverge from the guidelines.

Department lawyers say the new rules are in the interest of uniformity. But Ashcroft obviously was miffed that some judges weren't handing out the tough sentences that he wanted.

The sentencing commission has statistics showing that 35 percent of the sentences handed down in federal court in the 2001 fiscal year fell below the guidelines.

Many of those sentences were the results of plea-bargaining and had the approval of the prosecutors.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, said many judges have denounced the guidelines for producing "unduly long sentences" and hampering the courts' ability to fashion punishments to fit the crimes.

Ashcroft wants judges to treat defendants as "statistics rather than individuals," Turley added. In all fairness, Congress shares the blame for giving him even more power to do so.

In his new order to the prosecutors, Ashcroft cited a May 5 speech by Chief Justice William Rehnquist who acknowledged that it was up to Congress to establish guidelines on sentencing policies.

But Ashcroft conveniently failed to mention that Rehnquist also used the same speech to criticize the sentencing restrictions as "an unwarranted and ill-considered effort to intimidate individual judges in the performance of their official duties."

Rehnquist also complained to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, that limiting judicial discretion "would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and reasonable sentences."

In a speech last Saturday to the ABA convention in San Francisco, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a moderate conservative, criticized mandatory minimum sentencing and said prison terms were too long. He told the lawyers "our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long."

He branded the guidelines as "not wise, not just."

An even more dramatic protest against the guidelines came from U.S. District Judge John S. Martin. He quit the bench in Manhattan in June and charged that Congress was attempting "to intimidate judges."

U.S. District Judge Irene M. Keeley of Clarksburg, W.Va., who heads the ABA's National Conference of Federal Judges, supports the critics of the guidelines.

She said the jurists would continue to "evaluate each sentence on a case-by-case basis." A study of the facts will show there is no evidence that judges have been bending the sentencing rules, she said.

Obviously Ashcroft's sense of justice is not the kind that is touched by the quality of mercy.

(Helen Thomas can be reached at the e-mail address helent@hearstdc.com).

This is not about "statistics" but rather is an attempt to make judges subordinate to local prosecutors. They try to do this by making the decision of the local US attorney on what crimes to charge, not the trial by jury nor the sentencing by the judge, into the key factor in the judicial process.

This is about increasing the leverage that the local US Attorney has over suspects/ defendants before there is even a trial.

Note that it was the DOJ who came up with the Feeney amendment, "Mr. Feeney himself says he was simply the "messenger" of the amendment bearing his name, which was drafted by two Justice Department officials.

WTF:
The Congress, "our representatives" are merely the "Messengers" of Ashcroft?????

Was that flushing sound "Our" Constitution going down the Crapper?

Most criminal cases end in a plea bargain. So to extract the maximum number of convictions it is in the local prosecutor's interest to "overcharge".

Saying "these crimes here total up to 30 years, but if I let you plead guilty to a lesser charge it is only 3 years" have much greater force, on the innocent or the guilty, if he can add "Though the statutes did not have this in mind for 30 years if the jury finds you guilty,Feeney/Ahscroft makes the judge give you the whole 30" increases the extortionate effect.

And remember these people have *NOT* been convicted of anything.

When Congress uses words like "reform", "improvement", "technical correction", "equity" they are trying to push bills that often contain none of these qualities, but can be embraced by the ignorant or trusting.

There are tens of thousands of criminal provisions on the books. It is up to the US Attorney to use good judgment and exercise discretion in deciding what "crimes" to prosecute and what charges to bring. But a US Attorney has the personal goal of making his own record look as good as possible. So there are only two ways a US attorney can be dissuaded from overcharging:

1. the jurors will say, "Life for *that*, give me a freeking break." But jurors are voting in the dark, they do not know what the sentence is for "Count 3 of the indictment". And they are not allowed to be told. That is why we often hear of jurors saying that had they only known what the mandatory sentence was, they never would have voted the way they did.

2. the judge who hears what the case is about, and not merely reads what statute the defendant is charged under will say, "I know what this case is about and the sentence was never meant by the legislature to cover a case like this.

This "Reform" by Feeney/ Ashcroft does away with the power of the judge to make those judgments. Hello, isn't "Judge" supposed to be part of the job description"?

It greatly increases the power of the prosecutors to either overcharge, or to extort from a possibly innocent defendant a plea to a lesser sentence, so as to avoid draconian penalties if the prosecutor charges him under a bevy of harsh laws not intended to cover the fact pattern.

That there are too many such laws and that a prosecutor can pick his victim and then find the law to nail him is well known. Justice Jackson, a former US Attorney General and later Justice of the Supreme court wrote:

"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some sort on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who committed it, it is a question of picking the man, and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."

Also, this Feeney amendment was tacked on to the Amber Bill. Oh, that it fool 'em,it must be okay, after all "It's for the children."

And "Our" president, the "Conservative" George Bush signed this?

If the founding fathers came back they would have many worthy asses to put their boots up, including one jogging around Crawford, Texas.

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