Charging and Sentencing Decisions Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: A Three-District Study

University Of Nebraska At Omaha, Omaha NE

Investigators

Abstract

The enactment of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the subsequent promulgation of sentencing guidelines by the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) transformed sentencing in the federal criminal justice system. The highly discretionary and largely unregulated sentencing process of the pre-guidelines era was replaced by a tightly structured system in which judicial discretion is constrained by sentencing rules based largely on the seriousness of the offense and the offender's prior criminal record. Moreover, prosecuting attorneys, who played a fairly circumscribed role in the pre-guidelines era, have substantial influence on sentencing under the guidelines; in many cases, their charging and plea bargaining decisions determine the sentence that will be imposed by the judge. Research designed to evaluate the impact of these "revolutionary" changes in the federal sentencing process focus on sentencing decisions at the national level. These studies assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that there is little inter-district variation in case processing policies and procedures and that findings regarding sentence outcomes at the national level therefore reflect the reality of decision making in each of the U.S. District Courts. A second issue is that prior researchers have focused almost exclusively on the sentencing decision itself, rather than examining the prosecutor's charging and plea bargaining decisions. This research will address these methodological limitations by studying federal sentencing practices and outcomes at the district level and by using quantitative and qualitative research techniques to describe and analyze charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing policies, practices, and outcomes. The research will study three U.S. District Courts: the District of Nebraska, the District of Minnesota, and the Southern District of Iowa. The primary objectives of this project are: (1) to test for inter-district disparity in sentencing; (2) to describe charging and plea bargaining practices and to identify the predictors of charging and plea bargaining decisions; and (3) to examine the effect of offender and case characteristics on sentence outcomes at the district level. The researchers will collect data on all cases prosecuted in the three districts during fiscal years 1998, 1999, and 2000. They will obtain detailed data on the offender, the case, and the sentence from the USSC's Offender Datafile for each district for each year. They will supplement these data with information contained in the Presentence Investigation Report, the Sentencing Recommendation, the Order of Judgement, and other documents provided by each U.S. District Court. The researchers also will interview judges, attorneys, and probation officers in each district. The proposed study will fill important gaps in our knowledge of the dynamics of the federal sentencing process. It represents a first step toward understanding inter-district variation in case processing procedures and outcomes, removing the "cloak of secrecy that surrounds charging and plea bargaining in the federal criminal justice system, and untangling the complex inter-relationships among charging decisions, plea agreements, and sentence outcomes.