Copious commentary from SL&P’s Booker Tonight
I hope baseball fans might appreciate the cryptic title of this post: I am trying to analogize the Booker commentary here to the amazing baseball commentary on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight. The analogy seems apt because, for sentencing fans like me, Booker is the thrilling seventh game of a World Series to decide the fate of the federal sentencing guidelines. (The first six games were, of course, Almendarez-Torres, Jones, Apprendi, Harris, Cotton and Blakely.)
Amazingly, though Booker has now been decided (apparently in extra innings), we still do not know who won. Thus we need the help of commentators, the sentencing egg-head versions of ESPN’s Karl Ravech, Harold Reynolds, Tim Kurkjan, and Peter Gammons. And here I provide more commentary than anyone could possibly want.
First, around the blogsphere, in addition to the prior coverage assembled here and here and here, I can now link to additional insightful commentary from TalkLeft and from the White Collar Crime Prof Blog.
Second, I have for downloading below (1) a wonderfully thoughtful and insightful e-mail dialogue between Professors Frank Bowman and Alan Michaels about the realities of the Breyer remedy in Booker, and (2) a (typo-filled) transcript of yesterday’s tele-conference organized by Families Against Mandatory Minimums in which many informed commentators shared their first takes on Booker. Both documents are right with insights and food-for-thought.