“Marvin Frankel’s Mistakes and the Need to Rethink Federal Sentencing”
The title of this post is the title of a new article by Judge Lynn Adelman and Jon Deitrich, which will soon appear in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law. I am pleased and hornor to have permission to post the piece on the blog, and here is a paragraph from the introduction to further whet a sentencing guru’s appetite for great weekend reading:
We agree that Frankel was a brilliant professor and a distinguished judge and that Congress and the Commission implemented his ideas poorly. We also agree that he wanted sentencing to be more humane. However, we believe that Frankel’s analysis of sentencing was deeply flawed, and that the guidelines failed in substantial part because of the flaws in his approach. We also believe that discussing Frankel’s ideas is timely, both because of the recent Supreme Court decisions returning sentencing discretion to district judges and because of the recent interest in the problem of mass incarceration to which the guidelines have contributed. In this article, we discuss Frankel’s ideas, the problems with them, and their effects. We conclude with several recommendations as to how to improve federal sentencing.