Scooting justice

I’m thinking of a North Carolina man, a 25-year veteran and widely respected federal employee convicted of perjury, ordered to spend 33 months in prison for making false statements to investigators. The sentence was well within the federal guidelines that attempt to ensure punishments are relatively equal from case to case, but his attorneys appealed the ruling, arguing that the sentence was too severe. Can you guess who it is? I’ll give you another hint: one legal scholar said of future cases, defendants “are going to have an awfully hard time getting that sentence disrupted on appeal.” \nThat’s right, Victor A. Rita. Last month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his sentence by a vote of 6-3 after federal prosecutors from the Justice Department claimed that the recipient of 35 military commendations, awards and metals (and no prior criminal history) lied about his involvement in a gun registration violation.\nYou wouldn’t know it just by looking at the commutation of I. Lewis Libby’s 30-month sentence, but the Bush administration is an ardent supporter of federal sentencing guidelines, though they are often deemed excessive by legal scholars and the general public. “Scooter” Libby, as he’s known to both good friends and sworn enemies, was charged with perjury last year for disrupting an investigation into the leaking of former CIA agent Valerie Plame. Libby’s charges are not all that different from Rita’s – until lying to prosecutors about their various crimes, they were both in good legal standing and have families and careers that would be unfairly injured by the punishments. \nSo why did the president commute Libby’s sentence and not Rita’s? One of the two reasons he does anything: he either doesn’t know what he’s doing or doesn’t care.\nBy commuting Libby’s sentence, the president opened the floodgates for any number of appeals by white-collar and violent criminals alike demanding what Stetson University criminal law professor Ellen Podgor is calling “‘the Libby motion’: It will basically say, ‘My client should have got what Libby got.’ ” \nJust because Bush’s statements carry no legal weight doesn’t mean that judges will ignore them. He is (like Vice President Cheney) a co-equal branch of government, after all, and the opinion of the elected executive ought not be taken lightly. Surely, the Yale-educated president or one of the many aides and legal counsels he supposedly consulted over the course of several weeks (The New York Times, July 4) would have realized the trouble with contradicting one of their administration’s staunchest positions. But alas, Bush apparently failed to understand what lawyers and scholars immediately recognized as a very real “get out of jail free” card.\nInstead, Bush argued that Judge Reggie Walton took into account facts that the jury was not privy to, that he ignored Libby’s positive contribution in service to his country and that the Libby family would be unduly burdened by the jailing of Cheney’s former chief-of-staff. These are identical to the reasons cited time and again in appellate courts by defendants trying to reduce their terms, including Victor Rita. \nAttorney General Alberto Gonzales is even pushing for legislation making federal sentences tougher and less flexible. So if the administration won’t ease off the federal sentencing guidelines for identical crimes, but debated the possible ramifications of pardoning Libby or commuting his sentence for literally weeks, the only explanation is that the executive order was political favoritism and nothing more.