District court opinion takes apart career offender guideline
Providing a fitting complement to Judge Nancy Gertner’s recent work on what “similarly situated” means under the guidelines (discussed here), Judge Lynn Adelman has a new opinion deconstructing the career offender rules in US v. Seib, No. 07-CR-215 (E.D. Wisc. May 16, 2008) (available for download below). In addition to covering lots of important post-Booker ground, Judge Adelman drops this telling footnote in Seib which speaks volumes about modern federal sentencing realities:
This case demonstrated how the complexity of the career offender guideline can flummox even the shrewdest lawyers and probation officers, with potentially dramatic consequences. Defendant faced a guideline sentence more than three times longer under the career offender provision. One wonders how many prisoners languish behind bars for years under an improper career offender designation.