Sex offender sentencing

The law and policy of sex offender sentencing is always interesting and often quite depressing. My FSR co-editor Professor Nora Demleitner has put together a number of Federal Sentencing Reporter issues related to this topic, including this recent FSR issue focused particularly on risk assessment. And as many know, the infamous Feeney Amendment to the PROTECT Act provided for the most dramatic changes to federal sentencing in the arena of sex offenses — even though, as I discuss in Deciphering a Rosetta Stone of Sentencing Reform, 15 Fed. Sent. Rep. 307 (June 2003), the initial impetus for reform seemed to flow from DOJ concerns about undue leniency in white-collar cases.

Two recent cases involving sex offenders have today caught my attention. First, earlier this week, the Supreme Court of California, in People v. Barker, ruled that a sex offender “just forgetting to register” could be convicted as a “willful” violator of the state’s sex offender registration requirements. Though the case is principally about the meaning of “willful,” I found staggering the fact that Barker, by forgetting to register in a timely manner (he had registered properly before), could have received under the operation of California’s three-strikes law a sentence of 25 years to life! Interestingly, the trial judge in Barker’s case used his discretion to dismiss “all but one of his 10 prior strike convictions in the interests of justice” so that he could sentence Barker to only 9 years’ imprisonment for his failure to register.

Second, as briefly noted last week, a Michigan state judge declared Michigan’s state sentencing guidelines unconstitutional after Blakely. I was graciously provided with a copy of the ruling by Judge Timothy Pickard, in which he explains his view that parts of Michigan sentencing law involve mandatory guidelines and that, following the logic of Judge Cassell’s opinion in Croxford, no part of the Michigan system should be applied when one part is constitutionally defective. Though I do not know enough about Michigan law to comment on the soundness of this ruling, it is noteworthy that this article suggests that Judge Pickard reached his conclusion in order to be able to sentence a child molester to a much longer prison sentence than the state guidelines provided.