Pushing himself still further into the business of federal courts and of U.S. attorneys, Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered the attorneys to keep tabs on federal jurists who give sentences shorter than those called for in federal guidelines and report the judges to the Justice Department.
The point is to cow judges and to force local U.S. attorneys to appeal more sentences than the prosecutors have been inclined to pursue on their own. Washington's judgment, driven by statistics and ideology, will substitute for the judgment of prosecutors and jurists actually familiar with the human ins and outs of cases.
This comes atop pressure from Ashcroft for U.S. attorneys to demand more executions than the attorneys' own best judgment has suggested, especially in regions that don't especially fancy the death penalty, a sensibility that appears to offend our attorney general.
The sentencing guidelines permit judges to scale down recommended sentences when the circumstances warrant that -- which is to say, when to do otherwise would be unjust. But Congress, which never tires of taking cheap shots at supposedly lenient judges or of striking crude anti-crime poses, misused legislation creating the nationwide Amber Alert system this year to enact a provision that Ashcroft is now using as a license to start running federal courtrooms from his office.
Never mind that no less a conservative and law-an-order guy than Chief Justice William Rhenquist warned that such an undertaking "would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and reasonable sentences" or that gathering dossiers on judges, as Ashcroft now intends, "could amount to an unwarranted and ill-considered effort to intimidate individual judges."
Intimidating judges, and federal prosecutors while he's at it, is exactly what Ashcroft means to do. And why?
The U.S. prison population set another record recently -- 2,033,331, an increase of 2.6 percent in only one year. We have more people in lock-ups -- both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of population -- than any other country. U.S. 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.
The federal prison population has increased 69 percent just since 1995, with almost half the increase from drug offenses, most committed by persons with no history of violence.
The fad for mandatory sentences, abominations like the three-strikes laws and political hysteria over even casual drug offenses have added up to an incarceration mania.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy -- as a Reagan appointee, no softie -- has called for scrapping mandatory sentences, which he rightly says are "in too many cases ... unwise and unjust."
"Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long," he told the American Bar Association recently.
Imagine: not one but two conservative Supreme Court justices off the reservation. Shouldn't someone be ratting them out to the attorney general?
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com.
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