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"Supreme Court rules in favor of former Iowa drug addict"...
The Important Supreme Court Decision You Didn't Hear About Last Week
6 Mar.`11 - If you think Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church made out well last week before the U.S. Supreme Court consider the case of Jason Pepper. The confessed former methamphetamine dealer won his own case last week at the high court -- and may not have to go back to prison for his old crime (he was released pending the appeal).
The Important Supreme Court Decision You Didn't Hear About Last Week
6 Mar.`11 - If you think Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church made out well last week before the U.S. Supreme Court consider the case of Jason Pepper. The confessed former methamphetamine dealer won his own case last week at the high court -- and may not have to go back to prison for his old crime (he was released pending the appeal).
The reason you probably haven't heard much about Pepper is because the decision in his case, Pepper v. United States, came out last Wednesday just a few minutes before the justices released their opinion in the high-profile case of Snyder v. Phelps, in which the court upheld the free speech rights of anti-gay funeral protesters. Virtually all of the coverage of the day's Supreme Court news, and the next day's for that matter, focused on the Phelps' First Amendment case, leaving Pepper's sentencing decision under reported, if not completely under appreciated. "Supreme Court rules in favor of former Iowa drug addict" is how the Des Moines Register put it.
The court, in a 6-2 vote (Justice Elena Kagan recused), held that Pepper's rights had been violated when a judge who was re-sentencing him refused to consider the significant "rehabilitation" Pepper had accomplished since first being sentenced years earlier. In so doing, the justices moved to finally end an eight-year-long case (a case far longer, by the way, than either of the sentences meted out to Pepper) and generated another round of judicial debate over the roles of the courts and the Congress when it comes to crime and punishment.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion. She offered yet another interpretation of the vagaries of the sentencing guidelines, the congressionally sanctioned and judicially administered rules that help determine which convicted criminal gets which prison sentence and why. For the third time in six years, the court weighed the policies contained in those guidelines and rejected them. So that sound you heard late last week was the sound of federal prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys scrambling over their sentencing tactics in pending federal cases. Like its immediate predecessors, Pepper v. United States is required reading.
About those predecessors. In 2005, the Court in Booker v. United States stunned many people when it declared the guidelines "advisory" and not "mandatory" to give back some sentencing discretion to the federal judges who are asked to impose a sentence. In 2007, the court in Kimbrough v. United States, furthered refined the scope of the guidelines, again saying that they must yield to constitutional protections. And now Pepper, which is particularly relevant at a time when federal prisons in some jurisdictions (like California) are terribly overcrowded. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented (separately) and Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a concurring opinion.
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