Sunday, February 26, 2006

Professor Berman cracks down on the Fourth Circuit crack opinion

Professor Berman in this post has no use for the Fourth Circuit's opinion in U.S. v. Eura, in which the Court rejected the effort by District Judge Payne of the E.D.Va. to substitute a ratio of his own in place of the 100:1 crack to powder cocaine ratio in the Sentencing Guidelines.

I thought, just flipping through the opinion, that the issue was whether the District Court could look to non-case-specific factors such as the reports of the Sentencing Commission that had been rejected by Congress, to which the panel answered no, and on which point Judge Michael had some separate thoughts in his concurring opinion.

No comments: