THE ROBING ROOM

Another case where she injects personal feelings over the law. Second Circuit remands for resentencing, because of lower than normal imposed drug sentence. US vs Williams Schuler: Judge McMahon declined to consider a sentence within the range prescribed in the Sentencing Guidelines because of her views, which were repeatedly expressed at the sentencing proceeding, that the sentence she imposed should be comparable to the sentence Williams would have received had his case not been turned over to federal prosecutors. JUDGE: Everybody’s subject to federal law, Mr. Massey. It’s just a random event. Whether you get pulled into federal court or not tends to depend where you get arrested. Your office knows perfectly well how I feel about these cases. GOVT: Your Honor, we have the dual system and – JUDGE: Indeed we do. GOVT: – the defendant is not being treated differently than any other federal defendant. JUDGE: Well, I’m not going to treat him differently than any other New York defendant. JUDGE: My personal matter of policy. A case that’s obviously a state drug case where there’s no crack cocaine distinction, I don’t have to worry about that baloney, where I have, in effect, a first [-time] offender. The failure of the district judge to follow this explicit directive cannot be justified by her expressed desire to “avoid unwarranted disparities among defendants with similar records who have committed similar offenses,” apparently paraphrasing, without citing, § 3553(a)(6), which requires the district court to consider “the need to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar conduct.”