Spotlighting problems with quantity-based sentencing

Continuing its amazing work on sentencing issues, the Wall Street Journal today has this terrific article on how drug weights play a critical (and highly problematic) role in federal sentencing determinations.  (A subscription is required for on-line access, which I have finally bought.)  Some of the other recent potent WSJ sentencing articles, on issues ranging from snitching to Blakely, can be found here and here and here and here.

Today’s article by Gary Fields is entitled “Imperfect Measure: In Drug Sentences, Guesswork Often Plays Heavy Role,” and it spotlights the realities of — and serious problems with — the federal sentencing system’s heavy reliance on drug weights to determine sentencing outcomes.  Here are just some highlights from the article, which includes a number of amazing stories about how arbitrary a sentencing system can become when it relies greatly on precise drug quantities:

Under 1987 federal sentencing guidelines and other federal laws, the amount of drugs involved in a crime is crucial….  The goal of the guidelines is to standardize sentences, so that criminals dealing in the same amount of drugs get roughly the same sentence.

But when it comes to measuring the weight of drugs, procedures around the country are anything but standard. The amount of cocaine or marijuana in the defendant’s possession is just the start: What really matters is how much a person intended to procure or produce. That question leads the justice system into a speculative realm where botanists, chemists and forensic scientists imagine what might have happened if the defendant had had more time or skill.

The government is “very arbitrary in the way they are calculating yields that aren’t based on any scientific foundation,” says Warren James Woodford, an independent research biochemist who has testified about drug yields in many federal cases, often for the defense.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers have debated, for example, whether a man who hoarded bags of Chinese tea could have made a significant quantity of speed from it were he an expert chemist — which he wasn’t. Another man was caught growing thousands of baby marijuana plants. Had they grown up, how much marijuana would they have yielded? The answers to such questions can mean the difference of a decade or more in a prison sentence.