Pubdate: Wed, 07 Jan 2004
Source: Sun Herald (MS)
Copyright: 2004, The Sun Herald
Contact:  http://www.sunherald.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/432
Author: Tom Teepen

LAW AND JUDICIAL DISORDER

You'd think that being reamed out even once by the Chief Justice of the 
United States would be enough to get anyone's attention, but William 
Rehnquist has now let Congress have it twice and most members still aren't 
paying attention.

Rehnquist recently unloaded on Congress in his annual report on the judiciary.

. It seems," he wrote, "that the traditional interchange between the 
Congress and the Judiciary broke down when Congress enacted what is known 
as the Protect Act, making some rather dramatic changes to the laws 
governing the federal sentencing process."

Those changes, the chief justice charged, "could appear to be an 
unwarranted and ill-considered effort to intimidate individual judges in 
the performance of their judicial duties."

"Could appear to be" is hardly it. Intimidation is exactly what Congress, 
in eager cahoots with Attorney General John Ashcroft, intended.

Congress last year further reduced the already limited discretion of 
federal judges in sentencing criminals and required reports to Congress on 
judges who veer from the sentencing guidelines. And to make it clear that 
he means to hammer judges with the new law, Ashcroft ordered U.S. attorneys 
to keep tabs on jurists whose sentences fall short of the guidelines and 
report them to the Justice Department.

In one of those law-and-order blood lusts that often strike legislators, 
Congress rushed on beyond just establishing a national Amber Alert system 
to rescue kidnapped children, the original and unexceptionable purpose of 
the the legislation, and added the hysterical judge-bashing amendment 
pushed by Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla.

Hysterical, because the amendment was a knee-jerk response to faddish 
alarms about supposedly short sentences - and never mind that many of those 
sentences were plea-bargained as a way to speed up the deportation of 
illegal aliens. What's the point of first charging taxpayers to keep such 
defendants in prison for years before throwing them out of the country?

As with the unwise mandatory sentencing laws, three-strikes laws even for 
minor crimes and absurdly long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, 
lawmakers, in effect, once again not only prejudge cases they know nothing 
about but prejudge cases for crimes that haven't even been committed yet.

It is not as though this country is exactly soft on crime, demagogic claims 
to the contrary notwithstanding. Our incarceration rates are five to eight 
times higher than those of other industrialized nations and we typically 
imprison offenders far longer than other nations do for the same offenses.

This is, for once, not a purely partisan stand-off.

The very conservative Rehnquist was followed in his original beef last year 
by fellow justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, one each 
conservative and liberal. The law is opposed by the American Bar 
Association, the Judicial Conference of the United States and other legal 
bodies.

And legislation to quash the Feeney amendment has been proposed by Sen. 
Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. Rehnquist and Kennedy are the two poles of the 
spectrum of political sanity. It ought to say something to Congress and to 
the White House and its attorney general that on this matter, they fall 
outside both.
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