U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jose Cabranes criticized federal sentencing guidelines as "a bad case of social science run amok" in his speech titled "Fear of Judging: The Decline and Fall of Judicial Discretion in Federal Sentencing" Friday in 2 Rockefeller Center.
Cabranes said federal sentencing guidelines, products of the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act, were passed to provide mandatory rules to guide federal judges when sentencing and cut down on the "undue disparity" between judges' decisions for offenders of similar crimes.
Before the act, judges' sentences were "traditionally exercises in discretion," which took into account the offender's history, family life, the crime and the victim among other factors, he said.
Cabranes said the ultimate goal of the guidelines was to "create a heavily automatic process with a sentencing algorithm," by providing judges with a numerical system of point values depending on the crime and extenuating circumstances.
He said the defect of these guidelines is much misunderstanding by those participating in the criminal law process and by the general public, and confusing sentencing procedures that make people think the judicial system works arbitrarily.
In addition, Cabranes said the guidelines have failed to settle the original disparities between sentences and instead have exacerbated them.
Disparities originate from individual judges' value judgments and predispositions as well as the specific cases and severity of the crimes, he said.
"Reformers thought judges would act like computers," he said, but these differences in opinion occur regardless of the guidelines.
The guidelines' proponents "shouldn't be surprised that they haven't eliminated disparities," he said.
He said judges will perform "elaborate contortions" to depart from the guidelines when they feel it is necessary.
Cabranes discredited the criticisms of the federal system used to justify implementing the guidelines. "Criticizing judges is like shooting fish in a barrel" because it is difficult for them to respond, he said.
He said one criticism leading to the guidelines, that the federal sentencing system "reflects a political bias in favor of leniency," is inaccurate.
"The federal system was never associated with leniency," Cabranes said. "The federal justice system is and was a sense of national pride."
He said the charge that judges were "self-serving" and selfish for condemning the guidelines was wrong.
"It's not from a sense of loss of power," Cabranes said, but rather judges are "distressed with direct experience with the guidelines" and "mystified" by them.
He said both conservative and liberal judges are upset by the guidelines.
The great challenge facing the justice system today is to "restore the legitimacy of sentencing," he said.
