Prof. JaneAnne Murray Submits Comment to U.S. Sentencing Commission on Research Priorities

Professor JaneAnne Murray, clinical professor of law and director of the Clemency Project Clinic, submitted comments to the U.S. Sentencing Commission addressing the Commission's proposed priorities for the 2026-27 Amendment Cycle. The comments focused on the Commission's proposed evaluation of the guidelines and federal sentencing practices in light of the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Guidelines Manual. Murray argued that the Commission's research focused on the end-point of a judge's sentence, but fails to take into account the myriad factors that dictate how that end-point came to be.  

"Federal sentences are not produced by judges alone," Murray wrote in her comments. "They emerge from a complex sequence of discretionary decisions, including prosecutorial charging practices, the decision whether to invoke mandatory minimum statutes, plea bargaining strategies, cooperation agreements, the pursuit of sentencing enhancements, the quality of defense sentencing advocacy, the sentencing philosophies of individual judges, and the characteristics of defendants. Many of these factors vary substantially across districts, United States Attorneys’ Offices, individual prosecutors, defense counsel, and judges.  Because the Commission’s datasets largely observe only the final sentence, while capturing comparatively little about the upstream discretionary decisions that generated it, they necessarily provide an incomplete account of sentencing disparities. As a consequence, analyses based solely on sentencing outcomes risk attributing disparities to judicial decision-making or overlooking them altogether, when they may instead reflect systematic differences in charging practices, advocacy, or sentencing philosophies that precede the final judgment."