Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Big Day @ the Supremes

Regular reader(s?) will recall my discussion of two Supreme Court cases of recent vintage - Blakely and Booker - that changed the language, if not the real landscape, of federal sentencing. The confusion wrought by those two cases has reached the Supreme Court again in the form of Rita v. US and Claiborne v. US. The issues in the two cases, generally speaking, deal with the place of the United States Sentencing Guidelines in a system where they are supposedly only "advisory." This article from today's New York Times does a pretty good job of setting out the issues in advance of today's oral arguments. You can find transcripts of the oral arguments from the two cases here and here.

No comments: