Judge Adelman on variances from career offender guideline

The latest great sentencing opinion Sentencing Hall of Famer Judge Lynn Adelman addresses the (mis)application of the guidelines career offender provisions.  Judge Adelman’s terrific post-Booker work appears in US v. Fernandez, No. 04-CR-254 (E.D. Wis. June 28, 2006), as is available for download below.  Like all of Judge Adelman’s post-Booker efforts (much of which I’ve linked at the end of this post), Fernandez covers a lot of ground in short order and merits a full read.  Here are some snippets:

Because this case presented an example of how the career offender guideline can conflict with the purposes of sentencing under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), I instead imposed a non-guideline sentence that better served those purposes….

Applying the career offender guideline to defendant produced several stark results.  First, it produced a guideline range twice what it otherwise would have been.  Second, it produced a range about five times longer than any previous sentence that defendant received.  Third, it placed defendant in category VI even though his priors were more than 10 years old and committed when he was a young man, and even though he led a lawabiding life in the interim. Under these circumstances, the advisory guideline range was greater than necessary to satisfy the purposes of sentencing.

Download adelman_career_offender_sen_memo.pdf

Prior posts with some of Judge Adelman’s extraordinary post-Booker work:

• Another (very different) view of Booker from a district court
• Judge Adelman strikes again
• More amazing post-Booker work by Judge Adelman
• Three more great Booker decisions from Judge Adelman
• Judge Adelman spotlights problems with mandatories
• Judge Adelman on extraordinary acceptance of responsibility
• Judge Adelman provides more post-Booker wisdom
• More fast-track work from Judge Adelman