Former Judge Mark Bennett reviews his “Half Century Traversing the Arc of Federal Sentencing”

A helpful colleague made sure I saw this new article published recently in the latest issue of the ABA magazine Litigation authored by former US District Judge Maek Bennett.  Judge Bennett’s opinions and articles on various federal sentencing topics have appeared in this space many times through the years, and it is nice to see how he wrapped up lots of experiences and insights in this relatively short ABA article, titled “My Half Century Traversing the Arc of Federal Sentencing.” The piece merits a read in full, and here are its starting paragraphs: 

In the more than 50 years since I graduated from law school, there is no area of federal law that has affected more lives with more dramatic pendulum swings than federal sentencing.  I am now a retired federal judge who has spent nearly a third of my life populating the Federal Bureau of Prisons by sentencing more than 4,000 offenders, in five federal districts spanning the two districts in Iowa to the District of Arizona, the District of North Dakota, and the farthest reach of the federal courts in the District of the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan.

Flash-back to the summer of 1975: having started my own law firm after graduating from law school, I was involved in my first federal sentencing as a novice but eager defense lawyer. The defendant was to be sentenced by a conservative but fair federal district judge.  The defendant was a low-level small-time nonviolent, addict drug dealer with no prior criminal record other than two aging minor misdemeanors. Despite my lack of experience, he was sentenced to three years of probation and drug treatment.  Back then, probation was common for nonviolent first offenders.  Had an identical defendant appeared before me as a federal district judge, and many hundreds of them did, the defendant would have received a mandatory minimum 120-month or 240-month sentence, or possibly even more, depending on the drug quantity and aggravating factors.  This article chronicles the jaw-dropping arc of federal sentencing and the federal sentencing guidelines that help explain, but do not justify, this staggering disparity.