'I live to put people in jail': the hardline judges Trump wants on prison sentencing panel
Donald Trump has quietly nominated a slate of tough-on-crime former prosecutors to run a powerful agency that writes the sentencing rules for the entire federal prison system.
The US Sentencing Commission is an independent panel of seven members who set guidelines for federal judges to follow when calculating defendants’ prison time, with an emphasis on making sure that sentences are fair and not overly punitive. The commission is required by law to be bipartisan and to represent a diversity of backgrounds.
But Trump has broken from that precedent by proposing to fill the agency’s five empty seats with appointees who are nearly all white male former law enforcement officials. And Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, may, in the final months before the end of the president’s term, try to confirm these nominees, according to five Senate judiciary committee staffers as well as several advocacy groups.
“We’re worried they’re trying to cram these appointments through in case Trump loses,” said Kevin Ring, the president of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
More than 70,000 people every year have their prison sentences calculated according to the commission’s guidelines. The president’s nominees include Henry E Hudson, a federal judge in Virginia known as “Hang ’Em High Henry,” who once said, “I live to put people in jail.”
Hudson, a former prosecutor and the former director of the US Marshals Service, led a Reagan administration anti-pornography commission that claimed that viewing sexual images causes sex crimes. Critics also point to a case in which he has refused to apologize to an intellectually disabled person he prosecuted and sent to prison for a murder that DNA evidence proved the man did not commit.
Also among the president’s picks for the commission is Judge K Michael Moore of Florida, another former prosecutor and former director of the US Marshals. In 2015, Moore sent a non-violent first-time drug offender to prison for 20 years, a sentence so extreme that Trump himself commuted it four years later.
Other nominees include Judge Claria Horn Boom of Kentucky, a former prosecutor championed by McConnell, and John G Malcolm, a former prosecutor who is now the director of a judicial studies program at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The lone non-prosecutor in the group is Luis Felipe Restrepo of Pennsylvania, a judge and former public defender nominated to the federal bench by Barack Obama.
“These are honestly some of the most extreme rightwing nominees the administration could have possibly come up with,” said Rachel E Barkow, who was appointed by Obama to the sentencing commission and served until 2019. She is now a professor at the New York University School of Law.
Barkow noted that the commission is supposed to promote evidence-based sentencing reform, its decisions made based on facts about crime and recidivism rather than ideological posturing.
Trump and McConnell’s late effort to install a tough-on-crime lineup at this influential federal agency comes at a time when millions of Americans have taken to the streets to demand a less racially biased and more humane criminal justice system.
The president himself has for decades been a fierce advocate of the death penalty and punitive justice, but has also at times claimed to be a champion of more humane sentencing – based mainly on agreeing in 2018 to sign the First Step Act, which rolled back some of the federal system’s most draconian punishments.
But these sentencing commission appointments and Trump’s recent lawand-order rhetoric mark a return to form. “The president ought to choose people who will faithfully implement the First Step Act and be true to its intent,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator.
Trump has said little publicly about his nominees, perhaps to avoid provoking media attention that could complicate their confirmation by the Senate judiciary committee. Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice