Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered federal prosecutors to pursue maximum criminal charges and sentences whenever possible, and seek lesser penalties through plea bargains in limited circumstances, the Associated Press reported late September 22.
"It's a direction for the way we prosecute criminal behavior at the federal level,'' Ashcroft was quoted as saying following a Cincinnati speech. "If you violate a federal law, punishment will be uniform.''
The AP said Ashcroft sent a memo to all 94 U.S. Attorneys' offices ordering the new policy, which the AP said supercedes then-Attorney General Janet Reno's policy of allowing prosecutors greater leeway "to determine if the charges and potential punishment fit the crime."
The plea bargain exceptions, the AP said, include when a defendant agrees to provide "substantial assistance" in an investigation; defendants in so-called fast-track programs looking to unclog the courts; prosecutor opinion that proving the original charges would be difficult in court; if the likely sentence wouldn't be affected by a charge under a lesser crime; and, when multiple charges tied to the original crime remove incentives for defendants to plead guilty.
What Ashcroft likes to call bringing "greater symmetry" to the federal justice system is what critics like the Sentencing Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers call inflexibility.
"No two crimes, and no two defendants, are exactly alike,'' said Sentencing Project assistant director Marc Mauer to the AP.
Ashcroft's latest change "creates a system that is not only inflexible and problematic, but becomes a sort of immovable object," said NACDL past president Gerald Lefcourt. "You're adding more unfairness to the system.''
But Montana-based U.S. Attorney Bill Mercer told the AP the idea is to purge "disparity" between similarly situated defendants. "It's very hard to deter crime if there's a perception that a person isn't going to be held accountable for his or her actions,'' he told the AP.
