Waning Influence of Sentencing Guidelines in White-Collar Cases

February 4, 2015  |  New York Law Journal

The restoration of sentencing judges’ discretion in the post-Booker era has rendered the federal sentencing guidelines—widely perceived as unduly punitive—less important in the white-collar context. Statistics confirm that courts increasingly have chosen to impose non-guideline sentences and, in some recent high profile cases, even the prosecution has proposed sentences below the guideline range. The U.S. Sentencing Commission recently has responded to complaints about the guidelines’ application by proposing a series of amendments to the guidelines governing economic crimes. We discuss all of this in our latest New York Law Journal article.

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