In the course of my interviews with more than 30 federal judges over the past four years on what works and doesn’t work in sentencing advocacy, I asked many of them what a defense lawyer could do when he has a client who has committed a heinous crime. Most judges seem to agree that con men who prey on vulnerable ...
By Alan Ellis and Mark H. Allenbaugh This article reviews the current state of play in the quickly developing law of federal compassionate release. Compassionate release is one of the few grounds a federal judge can reduce a previously imposed sentence to time served. Considering the on-going pandemic, it is being sought at a record pace. We discuss some of the ...
Judge Nancy Gertner was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S.District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Her nomination was strongly supported by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. She served until 2011, during which time she issued numerous opinions on sentencing issues and was widely published in the area. She currently is a senior lecturer on law at ...
With increasing frequency, attorneys are seeing clients, particularly in child pornography cases, who suffer from autism. There is a new Bureau of Prisons program for young autistic offenders called The Skills Program. Click to read the article.
This article which was the follow up to an article that I wrote for Federal Lawyer magazine in September 2017, is the first of a series of articles on judges’ views on effective sentencing advocacy. Click to read the article.
Federal sentencing and prison experts Alan Ellis, Mark Allenbaugh, and Nellie Torres Klein continue their look at the First Step Act of 2018, a new bipartisan federal prison reform law. In Part 2 of this three-part series, they review a long-awaited revision to the controversial method for calculating good conduct time credits, which may result in more granted ...
The federal presentence investigation report (PSR) is crucial for two purposes: First, it is the document most heavily relied on by the judge in imposing sentence—particularly in those cases where a guilty plea has been entered and the court knows little about the defendant. Had the defendant gone to trial, the court would have more information about the individual—or at ...
