As many of you probably know by now, I am a man of certain dearly-held political and moral convictions. But actually, this is just a factual question (i.e., I don’t want it to become a political debate).
My question is simply this: Are there any white-collar federal crimes with mandatory minimum sentences associated with them? You can define “white-collar” anyway you want, for the purposes of answering my question. But I also assume it has an already fixed and obvious meaning in american speech.
Thank you in advance to all who reply:)
P.S. I wonder if this question has already been asked before, because I have a vague recollection it has. Please provide a link, if it has. In any event, I did a forum search before I posted this, and came up with nothing.
I don’t think that “white-collar” is actually a classification of the crimes themselves, but rather of who’s committing them and how they’re committed. Theft is theft, but it can be committed by hiding merchandise under your clothes when you walk out of a store, or it can be committed by cooking the books at a big company.
Every federal crime has a rather exhaustive commentary on appropriate sentences in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.
Chapter 2 (big PDF) contains information about individual offenses. Part B is titled “Basic Economic Offenses.” The section on embezzlement, for example, begins on page 34. The list of sentencing criteria is quite lengthy.
Officially, there are no minimum sentences for anything. The Supreme Court in US v. Booker ruled that mandatory minimums violated criminal defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights to a trial by jury, and unjustly interfered with judicial discretion. The sentencing guidelines are therefore now considered advisory only. But in practice federal judges tend to follow them fairly closely.
From memory, I believe the Supreme Court only struck down the mandatory nature of the sentencing guidelines. The guidelines were designed to limit the court’s discretion. For example, if a crime had a five year maximum sentence, the guidelines commission (not Congress) came up with a matrix of factors to tell the court, for example, this particular defendant should get between 24 and 31 months. (there were limited ways for the Judge to go above or below the presumptive range)
I think Congress still has the authority to set a mandatory minimum sentence, i.e., five years for using a gun in connecting with a drug crime.
