Court Opinion

ID: 9492926
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:53:38.111414+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:33.495944
License: Public Domain

BRIGHT, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
The appellant’s sentence is 262 months or twenty-one years and ten months. That is a mighty long sentence for a twenty-one-year-old man of Mexican descent and citizenship whose only prior criminal record relates to failure to have a proper driver’s license to serve.
Frankly, this prison sentence under the guidelines is a waste of time, money and more importantly, the adult life of a young man. Alatorre is an illegal alien and ought to be deported to his home country in Mexico. Instead, under the federal sentencing guidelines, the sentencing judge became obligated to imprison Alatorre for more than twenty years.
I write this concurring opinion to once again decry these unfair and irrational sentencing guidelines which drive the federal criminal justice system. See United *1080States v. Hiveley, 61 F.3d 1358 (8th Cir. 1995).
Recently, two outstanding law professors, Marc L. Miller and Ronald F. Wright,2 who have intensely and thoroughly studied the federal sentencing guidelines system, got it exactly right writing an article in the Buffalo Criminal Lqw Review which I quote below, including its title line:
Your cheatin’ heart will pine some day
And crave the love you threw away.
The time will come when you’ll be blue,
Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you.
Hank Williams, 1952
It is hard to know where to begin in describing the disaster that has become federal sentencing reform over the past twenty years. This disaster is all the more disheartening because the reform started with so much promise. Few reform efforts — especially in the area of criminal justice, and especially in the federal system — have had as much hope or thought at their core.
However, the sentencing guidelines that emerged from the new administrative process have been one of the great failures at law reform in U.S. history. The collapse was quick, and it has become difficult to defend the current system as the reasoned and principled system we believe Congress and reformers envisioned. The current guidelines are widely hated and in many ways dysfunctional. The expert agency that creates and monitors the guidelines — the U.S. Sentencing Commission — has morphed into an ineffectual caricature of an administrative agency. Rather than achieving honest, wise or equal sentencing, the primary effects of the guidelines (albeit in conjunction with other developments) have been to occupy increasing portions of the federal judicial workload, to raise the analysis of probation officers above the arguments of lawyers and the reasoning of judges, to shift the type of offenders in the federal system, to shift offenders from state to federal systems, and to pour offenders into federal prisons, for longer and longer periods.
How could such a thoughtful effort go so terribly wrong?
Marc L. Miller & Ronald F. Wright, Your Cheatin’ Heart(land): The Long Search for Administrative Sentencing Justice, 2 Buffalo Crim.L.Rev. 723, 723, 726 (1999) (footnotes omitted).
Is anyone out there listening?

. Marc Miller is professor of law at Emory Law School, and founding editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter (Vera Institute / University of California Press). Ronald Wright is professor of law at the Wake Forest University School of Law. Miller and Wright are the editors of Criminal Procedures: Cases, Statutes, and Executive Materials (1998).