The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Was Paul Manafort's sentence too light?
The response was swift when Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, was sentenced last week to less than four years in prison for financial fraud. Sentencing guidelines had recommended between 19 and 24 years.
“For context on Manafort’s 47 months in prison, my client yesterday was offered 36-72 months in prison for stealing $100 worth of quarters from a residential laundry room,” wrote Scott Hechinger, a public defender in Brooklyn and a pithy presence on criminal justice Twitter.
Hechinger and others like him have made a cottage industry of comparing the day’s hot topics — family separation of migrants, for example — to the circumstances faced by their clients every day. In their attempts to add perspective, they raise questions that resonate. Here are some answers.
How does Manafort’s sentence compare with others given to white-collar criminals?
In the 2017 fiscal year, about half of all federal sentences were below the guidelines. But in most of those cases, lesser punishments were handed down with the government’s support.
In fraud cases, 43 percent were sentenced within the guidelines. Many of those who received lower sentences were being rewarded for providing “substantial assistance” to prosecutors. Prosecutors have said that Manafort lied to them and did not provide useful information.
“How in the world can we make sense of the sentences that we have been handing down to the poor and to those people of color who didn’t have nearly the opportunities that Paul Manafort had to make an honest living?” said William N. Nettles, a former U.S. attorney in South Carolina.
So does that mean Manafort’s sentence was too light?
Maybe, said Marc Mauer, who oversees The Sentencing Project and is an expert in sentencing policy, race and the criminal justice system.
“Or maybe the guidelines are overly harsh,” he said.
Sentences in the United States, which has by far the largest incarcerated population in the world, tend to be extreme. In Manafort’s case, the guidelines, which are no longer mandatory for judges, called for 19 to 24 years.
“In a lot of countries you’d have to kill somebody to get anywhere close to that, yet we hand out 20-year sentences for drug crimes every day of the week,” Mauer said.
Much research shows that it is not the severity of the punishment but the likelihood of getting caught that deters crime, so devoting more resources to prosecuting white-collar cases would send a stronger message than handing down a longer sentence, Mauer said.
John Pfaff, a law professor at Ford- ham University, said rather than calling for wealthy defendants to be punished as harshly as everyone else, every defendant should be treated like a rich, white man.
Research shows that sentences tend to become lighter when those who mete them out are better able to empathize with the defendant.
“What do elite policymakers think the right sentence ought to be? It’s this,” Pfaff said. “We should use that as the baseline.”
How often do judges override sentencing guidelines?
In federal sentences, about half the time, often with the government’s blessing. The federal sentencing guidelines first emerged, in part, because of concerns that white-collar offenders were not receiving harsh enough penalties.
But some sentencing experts cautioned that public expectations for Manafort’s punishment might have been artificially high.
“It is a high-loss amount fraud case, and in those cases, your guidelines sentence can climb very rapidly,” said Rachel E. Barkow, a former member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. “That’s the point at which many judges depart, and depart more significantly.”
Barkow, a law professor at New York University, said she had expected Manafort’s penalty to fall below the sentencing guidelines, but she said the “extent of the departure was bigger than I would have guessed.”
Is there a racial disparity in sentencing?
Barkow agreed with critics who said that the Manafort case was a high-profile example of U.S. sentencing disparities.
“A wealthy, white defendant” who has lived a life perhaps similar to a judge’s, she said, might get “more sympathy.”
Within the discretion that federal sentencing guidelines allow, African-American men fare far worse when being punished. According to data published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2017, black men who commit the same crimes as white men receive federal sentences that are almost 20 percent longer on average.