Yesterday, I told my students in Election Law that longstanding assumptions about campaign finance regulation might be turned upside down today. That appears to have happened. In a special session, the United States Supreme Court just issued its decision in Citizens United v. FEC, and it has apparently overruled prior cases upholding the use of corporate treasury funds for express advocacy of the election and defeat of candidates. More later.
After pleading guilty in federal court to various drug-trafficking offenses, Isaiah Gregory received an eye-popping sentence of 327 months in prison — more than 27 years behind bars. Driving this extraordinary sentence was the district court’s finding that Gregory was a “career offender” under the federal sentencing guidelines. It was the career offender guideline that raised Gregory’s guidelines range from either 120-135 months (as he calculated it) or 121-151 months (as the government calculated it) to 262-327 months. Thus, the career-offender finding likely added more than fourteen years to Gregory’s sentence.
Although the term “career offender” may conjure up images of a hardened criminal with a rap sheet down to your knees, the guidelines require only two prior felony convictions of either a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense in order to trigger the career-offender sentence enhancement.
Even at that, Gregory hardly seems the sort of defendant that the Sentencing Commission must have had in mind when it drafted the career-offender guideline. In particular, one of his two qualifying convictions was a $30 robbery he committed when he was only fifteen (he is now in his mid-20’s) — a robbery for which he was sent, not to prison, but to a juvenile detention facility. Although it is not clear that the conviction should have counted under the plain terms of the career-offender guideline, the Seventh Circuit nonetheless affirmed his sentence last week in United States v. Gregory (No. 09-2735).
In 1789, as the inchoate American government was climbing out of the mountainous debt left over from the Revolutionary War, a thorny political problem emerged. While most of the chattering class was consumed with the debate over whether the states’ war debt should be federalized, another far more visceral controversy arose. Because the Continental Congress lacked funds during the war, the Revolution was funded partly by wealthy private citizens who invested in bonds. As a result of the lack of governmental money, many American soldiers were given worthless IOUs at the end of the war, as states scampered for a way to give the patriots their back pay. Many of these soldiers panicked, and sold their IOUs to speculators for as little as fifteen cents on the dollar. The problem was, once the federal government began repaying the debt, the value of the bonds soared. So who should get the money: the patriots who fought bravely for their country and only sold the IOUs because of fear they would get nothing from their government, or the speculators?