While I was sleeping...

The Supreme Court started issuing its slam-dunk per curiam opinions a couple weeks ago.

Moore v. United States - It's long been noted that there's a massive disparity in sentences between dealing cocaine and dealing the same amount of crack cocaine (I'd always heard ten -- it's actually closer to 3 to 6 times as lengthy, some sources indicate that the sentence for an amount of crack is equivalent to the sentence for 100x as much cocaine). It's also widely noted that this means that African-American drug dealers are punished in a vastly disproportionate fashion, since as Bob Roberts noted in his eponymous film "Don't do crack. Crack is a ghetto drug."

Moore gets convicted for dealing crack, gets a guideline sentence in the Northern District of Iowa for dealing crack, appeals to the Eighth Circuit, who affirms the sentence saying the Court is correct to ignore the disparity, because that's what the guidelines say.

The Supreme Court then decided Kimbrough v. United States last year, which says that the district courts can consider the disparity in imposing sentences under the guidelines (although, post-Booker, one can effectively ignore the guidelines as well, since they are purely advisory -- making the holding somewhat puzzling to me). So the Supreme Court remanded Moore's case to the Eighth Circuit -- which then essentially decides that the district court DID consider the disparity, since it was aware of Booker!

Moore, proceeding pro se, appealed to the Court which issued its per curiam opinion in his favor last week. So now the case is once again remanded to the Eight Circuit with orders to remand to the Northern District of Iowa, which may now use its discretion. Of course, everything the judge said leads me to believe that he is going to continue to apply the law, because indeed he has taken an oath to uphold it, and there are a number of judges who still apply the guidelines as rigidly as ever.

So, after all this, Moore has another sentencing proceeding, but it remains to be seen whether it will be any more favorable.

I have been a longstanding opponent of the federal sentencing guidelines. In a country with the largest percentage of its population in prison, including more than a million for drug offenses, the system needs meaningful reform. The sentencing guidelines for about a decade and a half helped to make this reform impossible, by requiring sentences that would be served in their entirety based on a rigid system of generalities. So if you had a one-time dealer of a few grams of crack and you had a dealer with lord knows how much marijuana, the crack dealer's going away for a lot longer, even though his role in the drug problem in the country was far more incidental. While there's obviously room for debate that any amount of marijuana warrants a lesser sentence because marijuana doesn't directly lead to deaths -- 1) it does lead to Pink Floyd cover bands and 2) it's still completely illegal.

But now that the guidelines are completely advisory, this case should never have been heard. The Court is essentially issuing an advisory opinion because it's issuing an opinion on guidelines that themselves are completely advisory. All it can do is order a court to use its discretion. It's starting to get close to a standing problem, as far as I'm concerned, because Moore's sentencing concern is not all that likely to be resolved by a favorable outcome.

In other news, the Supreme Court's website went down while I was writing this. The one hit must be all the site is set up to take in a day, which would explain its inexplicable "we're clearly trying to hide this site" URL -- of www.supremecourtus.gov. As you may know, the .gov designation is a designation for governmental entities in the United States alone. Thus, the whole us at the end of it is redundant, unless the Supreme Court is going to issue an opinion granting independence to the Confederate States of America, and they're just preparing for this next country.