Meet your new thread, same as the old thread.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
No. I'm hardly a huge Libby supporter, but the reasoning isn't that bad.

The issue as articulated is the proportionality of the sentence/punishment taking into account in the context of the individual's life and history.

Funny how the conservatives who have been agitating about the harsh sentence Libby got don't otherwise seem to have a problem with the Sentencing Guidelines. The "proportionality" here is that Libby got the same sentence that other perjurers get.

eta: From Fitzpatrick's statement:

• We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as "excessive." The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
This is your world Ty. In this world a prosecution can be a political hatchet job, completely without merit, even with a guilty verdict from a jury.

W - A - T - E - R

eta: Orin Kerr (no lefty):

• As I understand it, Bush political appointee James Comey named Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Fitzgerald filed an indictment and went to trial before Bush political appointee Reggie Walton. A jury convicted Libby, and Bush political appointee Walton sentenced him. At sentencing, Bush political appointee Judge Walton described the evidence against Libby as "overwhelming" and concluded that a 30-month sentence was appropriate. And yet the claim, as I understand it, is that the Libby prosecution was the work of political enemies who were just trying to hurt the Bush Administration.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
W - A - T - E - R

post hoc. Penske says hi, and that he hasn't tried canned wine yet.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Here's my reply: Marc Rich. Were you as angry then?

Yes I was. And I forgave lying to me about not having had sexual relations with that woman, but I didn't forgive Marc Rich.

And Susan McDougal did time.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Here's my reply: Marc Rich. Were you as angry then?

Scooter Libby wasn't. He represented him.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
She was the chief of operations for the CIA's Joint Task Force on Iraq (more), which may make her a nobody in your book, but not in mine.

Hmmmm . . . I wonder if she wasn't producing the kind of information on Iraq that Cheney wanted to hear . . .

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Here's my reply: Marc Rich. Were you as angry then?

David Boaz of Cato has some additional examples of folks in the clink.

• [T]here are plenty of other people who deserve presidential pardons or commutations. Families Against Mandatory Minimums has highlighted a number of good cases here:
  
  * Mandy Martinson — 15 years for helping her boyfriend count his drug-dealing money.
  
  * DeJarion Echols — 20 years for selling a small amount of crack and owning a gun, causing Reagan-appointed federal judge Walter S. Smith, Jr. to say, “This is one of those situations where I’d like to see a congressman sitting before me.”
  
  * Weldon Angelos — 55 years for minor marijuana and gun charges, causing the George W. Bush-appointed judge Paul Cassell, previously best known for pressing the courts to overturn the Miranda decision, to call the mandatory sentence in this case “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.”
  
  * Anthea Harris — 15 years when members of her husband’s drug ring received sentence reductions to testify against her, although she had not been directly involved in the business.
  
  A compassionate conservative should also use the pardon power to head off the DEA’s war against doctors who help patients alleviate pain. He could start by pardoning Dr. Ronald McIver, sentenced to 30 years for prescribing Oxycontin and other drugs to patients in severe pain. Or Dr. William Hurwitz of Virginia, sentenced to 25 years but then granted a retrial, convicted again, and awaiting sentencing, which could still be 10 years.
  
  Commute these sentences, Mr. President.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Funny how the conservatives who have been agitating about the harsh sentence Libby got don't otherwise seem to have a problem with the Sentencing Guidelines. The "proportionality" here is that Libby got the same sentence that other perjurers get.

I understand that.

For my part, I think that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines are an abomination -- both as a concept and (in some instances) as to the sentencing ranges.

I once sent three guys in their early 20s to the federal penitentiary for over 25 years for the sale of 33 grams of crack (more or less). That was the minimum of each of their ranges. (One might have only gotten 22-23 years.) That is not proportional punishment.

S_A_M

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
For my part, I think that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines are an abomination -- both as a concept and (in some instances) as to the sentencing ranges.

I think I've said something like this myself here. Often the effect is to shift discretion over sentencing from the judge to the prosecutor, who can charge a lesser offense.

[Gattigap]

Andrew Sullivan:

• "I don't believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own," - George W. Bush on why he signed death warrants for 152 inmates as governor of Texas.
  
  The quote is from his own book, "A Charge To Keep."

Gattigap

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Gattigap
David Boaz of Cato has some additional examples of folks in the clink.

• [T]here are plenty of other people who deserve presidential pardons or commutations. Families Against Mandatory Minimums has highlighted a number of good cases here:
  
  * Mandy Martinson — 15 years for helping her boyfriend count his drug-dealing money.
  
  * DeJarion Echols — 20 years for selling a small amount of crack and owning a gun, causing Reagan-appointed federal judge Walter S. Smith, Jr. to say, “This is one of those situations where I’d like to see a congressman sitting before me.”
  
  * Weldon Angelos — 55 years for minor marijuana and gun charges, causing the George W. Bush-appointed judge Paul Cassell, previously best known for pressing the courts to overturn the Miranda decision, to call the mandatory sentence in this case “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.”
  
  * Anthea Harris — 15 years when members of her husband’s drug ring received sentence reductions to testify against her, although she had not been directly involved in the business.
  
  A compassionate conservative should also use the pardon power to head off the DEA’s war against doctors who help patients alleviate pain. He could start by pardoning Dr. Ronald McIver, sentenced to 30 years for prescribing Oxycontin and other drugs to patients in severe pain. Or Dr. William Hurwitz of Virginia, sentenced to 25 years but then granted a retrial, convicted again, and awaiting sentencing, which could still be 10 years.
  
  Commute these sentences, Mr. President.

I wonder how Judith Miller feels.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Gattigap
David Boaz of Cato has some additional examples of folks in the clink.

• [T]here are plenty of other people who deserve presidential pardons or commutations. Families Against Mandatory Minimums has highlighted a number of good cases here:
  
  * Mandy Martinson — 15 years for helping her boyfriend count his drug-dealing money.
  
  * DeJarion Echols — 20 years for selling a small amount of crack and owning a gun, causing Reagan-appointed federal judge Walter S. Smith, Jr. to say, “This is one of those situations where I’d like to see a congressman sitting before me.”
  
  * Weldon Angelos — 55 years for minor marijuana and gun charges, causing the George W. Bush-appointed judge Paul Cassell, previously best known for pressing the courts to overturn the Miranda decision, to call the mandatory sentence in this case “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.”
  
  * Anthea Harris — 15 years when members of her husband’s drug ring received sentence reductions to testify against her, although she had not been directly involved in the business.
  
  A compassionate conservative should also use the pardon power to head off the DEA’s war against doctors who help patients alleviate pain. He could start by pardoning Dr. Ronald McIver, sentenced to 30 years for prescribing Oxycontin and other drugs to patients in severe pain. Or Dr. William Hurwitz of Virginia, sentenced to 25 years but then granted a retrial, convicted again, and awaiting sentencing, which could still be 10 years.
  
  Commute these sentences, Mr. President.

The kid in Georgia's ten year prison sentence for giving consensual head to his girlfriend is a much, much greater miscarriage of justice than any political yes man. Though, I assume it's not a federal charge, so Bush's newfound compassion for criminals would do him no good.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Bush's newfound compassion for criminals

More Orin Kerr:

• I find Bush's action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received. President Bush has set a remarkable record in the last 6+ years for essentially never exercising his powers to commute sentences or pardon those in jail. His handful of pardons have been almost all symbolic gestures involving cases decades old, sometimes for people who are long dead. Come to think of it, I don't know if Bush has ever actually used his powers to get one single person out of jail even one day early. If there are such cases, they are certainly few and far between. So Libby's treatment was very special indeed.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Have I been asleep? Did new facts come out? I thought that the whole problem with Fitzgerald is that he knew who the leaker was early on in the investigation (hint: it wasn't Libby - it was Armitage), but still proceeded forward. That why they could only convict him of perjury.

Answer me this - if this leak was such a blow to national security and for the purposes of discrediting Wilson/Plame, then why wasn't Armitage (who was no friend to the Administration) put on trial?

More Orin Kerr:

• A popular argument for why Scooter Libby should never have been prosecuted is that Patrick Fitzgerald knew early on in the investigation that Richard Armitage at the State Department was the leaker. If Fitzgerald knew Armitage was the leaker, why didn't he stop the investigation right away? Why did he continue? For some people, Fitzgerald's decision not to close up shop after learning Armitage was the leaker proves that he was an overzealous prosecutor run amok. He must have had some irrational desire to go after Libby, the argument runs, making the entire Libby prosecution unfair from the get-go.
  
  I don't find this argument persuasive. To see why, imagine yourself in Fitzgerald's shoes. Here are the relevant facts as you know them (reconstructed as best I can -- please let me know if these facts are misleading or wrong and I'll correct them). You've been appointed a special prosecutor to investigate intentional leaks to the media of the covert identity of a CIA agent. Early on in the investigation, you learn that one high-level political official has admitted that he leaked Plame's identity to one reporter; he claims that it was an accident, as he didn't realize the agent's status was covert. You also know that a lot of other reporters were leaked the same information, but you don't know who was behind those other leaks. The reporters won't talk: They insist on going to jail rather than revealing their sources.
  
  If you were Fitzgerald, would you close up shop at that point? Would you conclude without even speaking to other potential witnesses that the one high-level official was in fact responsible for all the leaks, and that he acted accidentally and entirely on his own? Or would you at least want to dig deeper to see if the story checks out?
  
  In that setting, I don't understand what was so overzealous about wanting to talk to Libby. An experienced prosecutor is going to wonder if the guy who rushes forward and claims the leaks were an accident is telling the truth. Maybe he is. But you don't want to close up shop and then read in someone's memoirs ten years from now that the official (Armitage) was the fall guy who came up with the "accident" story to cover up something -- and that he got away with it because the naive prosecutor bought the story and closed the investigation without even verifying the facts. Or maybe someone was using Armitage as an unknowing intermediary, making his story accurate from his perspective but only part of the picture. Or maybe there were other leakers -- either more leakers to the one reporter (Novak) who reported to the public about Plame, or other leakers to the other reporters. None of these are certainties, of course. But it is really so unreasonable to look into them?

[Hank Chinaski]

someone posted a link that will count distance on a map of one's running routes. can you repost? wrong page. all you dems get back to agreeing with each other.