Holder to Federal Prosecutors: Stop Using Threat of 851
Enhancements to Coerce Pleas
By Derek Gilna
Apparently
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s impending retirement from government
service has not extinguished his desire to rein in over-zealous federal
prosecutors. In a September 24, 2014 memo to federal prosecutors
made public, Holder has instructed them to only utilize 851 sentencing
enhancements in the instances where “unique facts and circumstances require its
use.
According to Holder, “whether a
defendant is pleading guilty is not one of the factors enumerated in the
charging policy…An 851 enhancement should not be used in plea negotiation for
the sole or predominant purpose of inducing the defendant to plead guilty.” In those two sentences Holder, who has
presided over several watershed reforms with the Depart of Justice (DOC) and
been a strong voice for sentencing reforms, delegitimzed this rampant misuse of
the prosecutorial sledgehammer used to extort guilty pleas from defendants.
Many other judges have spoken out
against this practice, but few with the fervor of Judge James Gleeson, of the
Eastern District of New York in one of his cases: “The Attorney General can
right those wrongs and the many other like them if he has the will to do so and
if the conduct of those inmates since they were sentence suggests it is
appropriate. The United States Attorneys
around the country have the power to go back into courtrooms and to request
sentencing judges…to vacate sentences that were mandated by prior felony
information and amounted to miscarriages of justice.
Any claim,” the judge continued, “that such a
request can only be made if there’s a defect in the underlying proceedings
would just be an excuse. The underlying
defect is the abuse of prosecutorial power that produced the sentences in the
first place. (Prisoners) will certainly
not object to a request for remedial relief, and if the judges choose to vacate
and resentence on the joint request of the parties, justice will have been
served.”
I would be pleased to look into
just such relief for you on this subject, along with any other sentence
reductions you might be entitled to. Also visit me at clemencyrelief.com.
