I had an email from a current client complaining that I wasn't adding enough entries so this will hopefully appease him and whomever else is reading.
I have been extremely busy. I have a client, set for sentencing this Thursday, who has been charged in Federal Court with delivering approximately 400 grams of heroin. He was set up, naturally, by someone intent on working off his own case with the government. I see this type of cannibalism a lot, and it is almost always between low level nobodys with the same loose associations. It would make a good blog entry, and later I will probably expound on it.
Under the federal sentencing guidelines my client should be looking at around 48 months for the delivery, but through the magic of guideline manipulation, his recommendation has ballooned to approximately 120 months. How? Because, unbeknownst to us until the PSR was prepared, somewhere out there a "confidential source" was caught with 132 kilograms of cocaine and identified my client as someone involved in the transaction. There is no independent verification of this statement, mind you. There is no record of this "source" providing truthful information in the past. But there you have it. The government is happy to provide this information, whether they believe it or not, to U.S. Probation. And if, as in this case, my client wasn't actually involved he is left only with the impotent option of filing an objection denying the allegation. But who is the Judge going to believe?
It's frustrating because the government wants to call this the War on Drugs. Even assuming my client was involved in the cocaine deal involving the 132 kilograms, I can assure you that he wasn't some big fish. He wasn't setting up any drug deals. He was a buffer for the huge drug empire that continues to remain impervious to prosecution. He was merely a go-between. By using people like my client, this empire continues to thrive and grow while little people like my client and his family are discarded and left to spend vast portions of their life in Federal prison as punishment for the sins of the empire.
Alas, this is the current state of the law. But for how long, I wonder? I have filed objections recently that sound a lot like what Justice Scalia complained about in Blakely v. Washington, 124 S.Ct. 2530(2004). He said that the "fairness", much less the constitutionality, of such an approach is questionable when a "defendant, with no warning in either his indictment or plea, would routinely see his maximum potential sentence balloon from as little as five years to as much as life imprisonment, based not on facts proved to his peers beyond a reasonable doubt, but on facts extracted after trial from a report compiled by a probation officer who the judge thinks more likely got it right than got it wrong". Blakely, at 2542
Looks like the Judicial giants that matter the most are thinking about this problem. In the meantime we will keep up the good fight!
Permalink
