The American Inquisition: Sentencing after the Federal Guidelines

Abstract

Despite the series of important Supreme Court sentencing decisions of the past ten years, federal sentencing remains fundamentally inquisitorial. Although the guidelines are no longer legally binding, they continue to taint the entire federal criminal justice system by needlessly discouraging defendants from exercising their trial right and pressuring them to confess. Their continued vitality is largely due to Justice Breyer’s persistent view, first as one of the architects of the original guidelines and later as a Supreme Court justice, that sentencing is an administrative problem requiring an administrative solution. The heart of this solution is that the facts of each case and the appropriate punishment are to be determined not through the parties’ competing presentations, but through a probation officer’s purportedly 'neutral' investigation. This method of resolving factual issues, together with the guidelines’ harsh penalties for invoking the right to trial and lavish rewards for incriminating others, result in a system that is not only unfair but also intrinsically incompatible with our adversarial system of justice.

Existing scholarship on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines has not examined how the guidelines purposefully discourage exercise of the right to trial and pressure defendants to admit to every allegation against them (and others). The central role that the United States Probation Office plays has also not been thoroughly examined. Far from undertaking merely ministerial and innocuous tasks, as most of the existing scholarship assumes, probation officers are tasked by the guidelines with the most critical role at sentencing. Often, they exert far greater influence on case outcomes than defense lawyers and prosecutors. The article concludes that the present sentencing process is unconstitutional but can be easily reformed by restoring control over each case to the parties.

Keywords: Sentencing, Federal Sentencing Guidelines

JEL Classification: K14, K41