Judge Gertner takes on the career offender guidelines
The holiday season has not kept US District Judge Nancy Gertner from completing her latest Booker opus, US v. Ennis, No. 03-cr-10298 (D. Mass. Dec. 21, 2006) (available below). In Ennis, Judge Gertner assails the application of the career offender guideline, and here is one of many choice snippets:
This memorandum will address why in the sentencing of three defendants … who qualify as “career offenders” under the United States Sentencing Guidelines after United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 221 (2005). Many courts, while announcing that the Guidelines are advisory, are in fact following them nearly as rigorously as they had before Booker. Under the circumstances, it is especially important to spell out the legal limitations of the career offender guidelines, in general, and in their application to these cases, in particular. Let me be clear: If I choose not to follow the career offender guidelines in the case of these defendants, it is not because I simply disagree with them and chose to substitute my own idiosyncratic philosophy of sentencing. It is because the career offender guidelines as applied to the cases at bar are wholly inconsistent with the purposes of sentencing in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a).