Have Blakely and Booker depressed federal prosecutions?

I have been speculating since last June that the legal disruptions caused by Blakely and Booker might impact federal prosecutions.  My theory was that, with extra time consumed with re-writing indictments and dealing with new legal issues, federal prosecutors might not be able to initiate as many prosecutions as they tried to assess an uncertain criminal justice landscape.  An interesting new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) on federal prosecutions seems to provide some empirical support for my theory.

The TRAC report actually carries the headline “New Justice Department Data Show Prosecutions Climb During Bush Years.”  However, this table of data shows that, while immigration and weapons prosecutions have grown considerably during the Bush Administration, the number of drug and white-collar prosecutions have remained fairly steady.  And, critically for my Blakely/Booker theory, these numbers show a significant dip in drug and white-collar prosecutions in 2004 and a dip in all four of these major crime categories for the first-half of 2005.  (These trends are all detailed in this effective chart.)

Of course, a lot of factors may account for these trends, and a bigger story might just be the overall growth in federal prosecutions over the last two decades (detailed in data here and this chart), although most of this growth clearly comes from a massive increase in immigration prosecutions in border districts.  Nevertheless, the potential ripple effect of Blakely and Booker on the federal caseload is an important story, especially as policy-makers and others consider how to assess and respond to post-Booker developments.