Legal Change and Sentencing Norms in the Wake of Booker: The Impact of Time and Place on Drug Trafficking Cases in Federal Court

Abstract

The federal sentencing guidelines have lost some authoritative force since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a series of recent cases that the guidelines are advisory, rather than presumptive, in determining criminal sentences. While these court decisions represent a dramatic legal intervention, sociolegal scholarship suggests that organizational norms are likely to change slowly and less dramatically than the formal law itself. The research reported here looks specifically at the consequences of such legal transformations over time and across locale, using multilevel analysis of U.S. Sentencing Commission sentence outcome data from 1993 to 2009. Our findings suggest that districts vary considerably from each other in sentencing practices over the time period studied, and that there is relative within-district stability of outcomes within districts over time, including in response to the Supreme Court's mandates. We also find that policy change appears to influence the mechanisms by which cases are adjudicated in order to reach normative outcomes. Finally, we find that the relative district-level reliance upon mandatory minimums, which were not directly impacted by the guidelines changes, is an important factor in how drug trafficking cases are adjudicated. We conclude that local legal practices not only diverge in important ways across place, but also become entrenched over time such that top-down legal reform is largely reappropriated and absorbed into locally established practices.We would like to thank

US Criminal Justice Policy and Practice in the Twenty‐First Century: Toward the End of Mass Incarceration?

“…Specifically, the fact that the system response to all types of offenses has intensified is consistent with the idea that enormous institutional interventions, such as mass incarceration, expand institutional capacity and the motivation of the actors who inhabit those institutions to conduct their work in ways that preserve jobs, authority, and resources. As Lynch and Omori (, 441) conclude, “In the context of those institutions that generate prisoners . .…”

“…Institutional and sociolegal studies highlight the importance of shifting our analytic focus from “the highly visible politics of large‐scale reform to the subterranean political processes that shape ground‐level policy effects” (Hacker , 243). Although legislative developments are potentially consequential, their institutional effects are powerfully shaped by the “street‐level bureaucrats” who work in criminal legal institutions (Ulmer and Johnson ; Verma ; Lynch and Omori ; Bushway and Forst ; Johnson, Ulmer, and Kramer ; Maynard‐Moody and Musheno ; Lynch ). These frontline workers tend to “emphasize the role demands that they feel are worthwhile and within a set of broad organizational constraints, and will subvert or downplay the tasks and duties deemed unimportant or somehow problematic” (Lynch , 844–45).…”

“…Although these interpretations differ, both focus on sentencing law as the primary measure of penal change. By contrast, sociolegal scholars emphasize that formal law's institutional effects are powerfully shaped by the “street‐level bureaucrats” who shape law's meaning and effects though their everyday decision making (Ulmer and Johnson ; Lynch ; Verma ; Lynch and Omori ; Bushway and Forst ; Halliday et al ; Johnson, Ulmer, and Kramer ; Maynard‐Moody and Musheno ; Silbey and Sarat ; Lipsky ). Sociolegal scholarship thus underscores the need to analyze “law in action” as well as “law on the books” when assessing the contemporary criminal justice field.…”

The Law-Before: Legacies and Gaps in Penal Reform

“…While recognizing the existence of a predominant penal order, such as “mass incarceration,” this literature reveals the multiple, often contradictory, ways that punishment transforms over time and across place, including how law becomes mobilized in different settings. These settings are conceptualized geographically as well as jurisdictionally, and exhibit variation at multiple units of analysis, including among nations (e.g., Savelsberg ), states (e.g., Barker ; Campbell and Schoenfeld ), counties (e.g., Arvanites and Asher ; McCarthy ; Percival ; Weidner and Frase ), and court jurisdictions (e.g., Lynch and Omori ; Ulmer ).…”

Federal Sentencing Guidelines andUnited States v. Booker: Social Context and Sentencing Disparity

“…In essence, Booker expanded judicial discretion. A number of researchers have examined changes to federal sentencing since Booker (see Fischman & Schanzenbach, 2012;Lynch & Omori, 2014;Nowacki, 2015;Starr & Rehavi, 2013;Ulmer et al, 2011a;Ulmer, Light, & Kramer, 2011b, U.S. Sentencing Commission [USSC], 2006, 2012.…”