Justice Jackson expresses interest in seeing fraud sentencing guidelines “revisited”

This new Reuters article discusses (too) briefly Justice Jackson’s comments today about the federal sentencing guidelines at the ABA’s White Collar Crime Institute:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said on Thursday she would support revisiting sentencing guidelines for white collar crime because the current framework leads to uneven punishments.

The amount of money involved has more sway than the level of culpability, Jackson noted at an American Bar Association conference in Miami. “Fairness requires that similarly situated defendants be treated similarly.”

“I’d like to see the guidelines revisited as a whole,” she said to applause from the audience largely composed of white collar criminal defense lawyers.

Jackson, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, previously served on the independent U.S. Sentencing Commission, which develops guidelines for judges to consider as they impose sentences.

During her time on the commission, she said the recommended sentences in white collar cases “ratcheted way, way up” because of the rising amount of money involved in fraud schemes.

Without a lot more details and context, it is hard to tell if Justice Jackson said something particularly provocative with these comments. But it does appear that she criticize the problematic structure and undo severity of the fraud guidelines.