“Not Ordinarily Relevant”: Bringing Family Responsibilities to the Federal Sentencing Table

INTRODUCTIONIn 1997, in United States v. Archuleta, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that the district court improperly reduced Joseph Archuleta's sentence by taking into consideration his role as the sole caregiver of his two minor children and his elderly mother.1 Archuleta indicated there were no alternative caregivers for his family, but the Tenth Circuit found inadequate evidence of this on the record and refused to remand for further evidence.2 Although the court acknowledged the difficult facts at hand, it felt constrained by the Federal Sentencing Guidelines' ("Guidelines") restrictions against using family responsibilities to impose a lower sentence.3 Archuleta's family was left out of the sentencing process because the court operated under the limitations imposed by the Guidelines.4 This resulted in the imposition of a sentence without adequate information about Archuleta's family circumstances.5Families of inmates experience significant negative impacts when courts do not include defendants' family responsibilities in their sentencing calculations.6 These impacts are not just emotional, but extend to financial as well as long-term psychological and social effects.7 Brought to light in a comprehensive report by the National Research Council in 2014, these unsettling effects have made national headlines.8 Congress and the President are now taking steps to initiate reform, adding a new chapter to the long history of federal sentencing reforms.9Over the past ten years, revisions to the Federal Guidelines and several seminal U.S. Supreme Court decisions have resulted in significant changes to federal sentencing.10 Despite those changes, federal sentencing procedures continue to ignore the interplay between a defendant's family responsibilities and the impact of sentencing on a defendant's family.11 Probation officers and district courts still lack a comprehensive way to communicate and analyze family impact during sentencing.12 Today, defendants' families face the same broken system that the Archuleta family faced in 1997.13 The impact on defendants' families is often described as "collateral damage" in the sentencing process.14 This description underscores the limited role family impact plays during sentencing.15 In the same way federal sentencing procedures treat victims as third-party stakeholders, these procedures must also recognize defendants' families as stakeholders.16This Note argues that law and policy require courts to evaluate the impact of sentencing on a defendant's family.17 In order to accomplish this, two changes must be realized.18 First, the U.S. Sentencing Commission must revise the Federal Guidelines to require judges to consider family impact as a factor in sentencing decisions.19 Second, the Judicial Conference should amend Rule 32 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to require that presentence investigation reports include a family impact assessment.20Part I of this Note provides an overview of federal sentencing procedures regarding a defendant's family responsibilities and includes an introduction to impact assessments.21 Part II looks at the long-term impact of those decisions on families of inmates, reviews how courts apply federal sentencing procedures regarding family responsibilities, and provides an example of how San Francisco has successfully incorporated family impact assessments into its sentencing procedures.22 Part III argues that the Guidelines should be amended to require consideration of family ties, and that assessments of the impact of sentences on defendants' families should be provided to sentencing courts in all federal criminal cases.23I. FEDERAL SENTENCING PROCEDURES: THEN AND NOWFor the past twenty-five years, courts have used Federal Sentencing Guidelines ("Guidelines") as part of sentencing procedures in criminal cases.24 Yet for the past ten years, courts have no longer been required to follow those Guidelines in all cases. …