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Legal Change and Sentencing Norms in the Wake of Booker: The Impact of Time and Place on Drug Trafficking Cases in Federal Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mona Lynch  and
Marisa Omori
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Abstract

The federal sentencing guidelines have lost some authoritative force since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a series of recent cases that the guidelines are advisory, rather than presumptive, in determining criminal sentences. While these court decisions represent a dramatic legal intervention, sociolegal scholarship suggests that organizational norms are likely to change slowly and less dramatically than the formal law itself. The research reported here looks specifically at the consequences of such legal transformations over time and across locale, using multilevel analysis of U.S. Sentencing Commission sentence outcome data from 1993 to 2009. Our findings suggest that districts vary considerably from each other in sentencing practices over the time period studied, and that there is relative within-district stability of outcomes within districts over time, including in response to the Supreme Court's mandates. We also find that policy change appears to influence the mechanisms by which cases are adjudicated in order to reach normative outcomes. Finally, we find that the relative district-level reliance upon mandatory minimums, which were not directly impacted by the guidelines changes, is an important factor in how drug trafficking cases are adjudicated. We conclude that local legal practices not only diverge in important ways across place, but also become entrenched over time such that top-down legal reform is largely reappropriated and absorbed into locally established practices.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 411 - 445
Copyright
© 2014 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Amy Baron-Evans, John Hipp, Richard McCleary, Lou Reedt, Elina Treyger, as well as the LSR editors and anonymous reviewers for their thoughts, comments, and advice. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, Stanford Law School. This project was supported by Grant No. 2010-IJ-CX-0010 awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

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