Finding Justice Through Truth: Making the Federal Criminal Legal System Fairer and More Just by Considering the Full Ramifications of Sentences

This essay was originally written in the summer of 2024 as an invited comment to the United States Sentencing Commission as part of their process to promulgate updated sentencing guidelines. The invitation raised the broad question how federal criminal sentencing might be made fairer and more just. This essay argues that we can work toward accomplishing goal by ensuring that prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges are empowered to consider the full ramifications of a criminal sentence when deciding an appropriate sentence. To better facilitate this goal, this essay argues that the Sentencing Commission might help lawyers and judges systematically to consider issues like solitary confinement, the punishment of slavery or involuntary servitude, and the way that a sentence will impact people beyond the defendant. Encouraging these inquiries is vital because the Sentencing Commission is excellently positioned to both study and guide how the many seemingly disconnected decisions of lawyers and judges in individual sentencing hearings lead to the broader systemic impacts of the federal criminal legal system. This essay concludes with a coda reflecting on the amendments to the Guidelines that the Sentencing Commission ultimately proposed. It argues that those amendments are a step in the right direction, but to truly make this system one deserving of the title “justice,” they must be the first step of many.