The guidelines on white collar cases are so out of whack. Everyone knows it. They lead to absurd sentences for first time, non-violent offenders.
And even trying to figure out the guidelines is oftentimes based on guesswork. Some appellate courts are starting to put district judges on blast. Here’s the Third Circuit, reversing a monster sentence in a pill mill case because the district judge’s calculations were just speculation:
Yet the evidence did not support a reliable extrapolation.
The District Court used the medical expert’s review of twenty four files to infer the illegality of thousands of other prescriptions. In the court’s view, that sample size was not “statistically
valid.” JA 2336. Yet it extrapolated anyway. And without
much explanation from the District Court, Titus had no chance
to “respond meaningfully, or for that matter, at all.” United
States v. Nappi, 243 F.3d 758, 766 (3d Cir. 2001).Plus, the government never showed that the sample was
large enough to be reliably representative of the remaining
thousands of prescriptions. (Though statistical evidence can
help to show that a sample size is large enough to support reliable inferences, we do not hold that such evidence is always
necessary.) Nor did it document proper extrapolation methods.
And it never explained how extrapolating from this sample
could prove the huge drug weight by a preponderance of the
evidence. So the sentencing court failed to “ensure that the
Government carrie[d] [its] burden [of proof] by presenting reliable and specific evidence.” United States v. Roman, 121 F.3d
136, 141 (3d Cir. 1997) (internal quotation marks omitted).