It’s a Blakely morning

Howard Bashman at How Appealing and Jason Hernandez yet again do fine work collecting the morning Blakely news here and here.

The most noteworthy news in the collection of stories comes from this article, which reports that Maryland US District Judge Catherine Blake found the federal guidelines unconstitutional and unseverable and then imposed life sentence on a defendant Aaron Foster who had been convicted in April of operating a drug gang in a housing complex. In a brief (under)statement, the defendant’s attorney noted that the decision to scrap the guidelines “wasn’t very helpful to Mr. Foster.”

Highlighting other choice quotes, in this article we hear US Attorney Steven M. Biskupic from Wisconsin explain that the “main thing we’re trying to avoid is having to re-do 100 sentencings after the Supreme Court decides what it’s doing.” And in this article discussing the Eighth Circuit’s Mooney decision, we hear US Attorneys from Minnesota and North Dakota saying that the “worst is the unknown” and that this “has the potential to be an enormous, enormous burden on the court.”