September 2011

By Glenn Sugameli, Staff Attorney, Defenders of Wildlife's Judging the Environment. Sugameli founded in 2001 and still heads the environmental community's Judging the Environment project and website on federal judicial nominations and related issues.

Justice delayed has become justice denied, as continuing, unjustifiable Senate obstruction of consensus federal judicial nominees delays resolution of urgent health, safety, environmental, and other cases.

Incredibly, Senate Floor votes on 27 judicial nominees are being blocked, four more than I decried in my September 2010 ACSblog guest post, "Federal Judicial Vacancy Crisis Deepens as Unnamed Senate Republicans Block Floor Votes on All 23 Pending Judicial Nominees."  By next week, the Senate Judiciary Committee will raise the total to 32 by approving five more consensus nominees.

The 92 current federal court vacancies are almost 50 more than the 44 I mentioned in my December 2008 ACSblog post. There are still 21 announced future vacancies, and current vacancies that the U.S. Courts have declared to be "judicial emergencies" have increased during President Obama’s term from 20 to 35.

A sweeping nonpartisan push to fill federal judgeships extends from Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, to the American Bar Association and Federal Bar Association, to countless editorials boards and commentators from across the nation.

The Judiciary Committee has only approved President Obama’s judicial nominees who have been endorsed by both home-state senators. Yet, only one circuit court judge has been confirmed since May. As Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) described today, Senate agreement to confirm the first two district judges since before the August recess is merely the tip of the iceberg:

By Nkechi Taifa, senior policy analyst for the Open Society Policy Center. She will discuss drug policy reform during two panel discussions at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference this week.

For a quarter of a century mandatory minimum sentences have resulted in egregiously severe and harsh punishments which often do not fit the crime, have racially disparate outcomes, increase overcrowding, and exacerbate prison costs. These sentences are the result of a war on drugs that has been disproportionately fought in Black and Latino communities. The impact of the war on drugs on individuals, families, and communities has been likened to a “new Jim Crow,” resulting in the mass incarceration and over-representation of people of color in the criminal justice system. 

As a quick reminder: A mandatory minimum sentence is a prison term predetermined by Congress and automatically imposed for certain crimes, primarily drugs and firearms. It is the minimum penalty that a judge must impose. In most cases the sentence is at least five years, and often it is 10, 15, or 20 years or more, even for nonviolent first time offenders. 

One of the problems with inflexible mandatory sentencing laws is that they are applied regardless of the role of the defendant and of other factors, which judges traditionally take into account for sentencing, such as the history and characteristics of the defendant and the likelihood of rehabilitation.