White-collar Booker breaks
This news report on an insurance analyst receiving a below-guideline sentence for his role in an insider-trading scheme has me again wondering, as I did in this long ago post, whether white-collar offenders may be the biggest beneficiaries of the new sentencing discretion Booker gives to federal judges. Of course, even if this is true, it might suggest, as discussed before, that the guideline ranges in white-collar cases are too harsh, not that federal judges are exercising their new sentencing discretion inappropriately.
Notably, the post-Booker sentencing data from the US Sentencing Commission (available at this link from the USSC’s Booker webpage) would seem to support my conjecture. The USSC’s data indicate that theft and fraud offenses (along with firearm offenses) have the highest rate of judges imposing sentences “otherwise below” the applicable guideline range. That data point should be examined in context, however, since it appears that theft and fraud offenses have the lowest rate of prosecutor-initiated departures. Judges are perhaps somewhat more lenient in theft and fraud cases perhaps because prosecutors (especially post-Enron) may be particularly harsh in these cases. (Moreover, statistics for theft and fraud offenses, which include bank robberies, serve as an imperfect proxy for true white-collar offenses.)
Some related prior posts: