Safety Valve Sentencing in Federal Court If you are convicted of a crime in federal court, many times there is a mandatory minimum sentence involved. The court must give you at least this mandatory minimum sentence, absent some exception. The federal “safety valve,” as it is called, is one of only a few ways out of a mandatory [...]
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United States Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. recently issued a Memorandum to all federal prosecutors (the “Holder Memorandum”) addressing the Department of Justice’s policy on charging and sentencing federal crimes. This memorandum is very significant, as it supercedes several previous memoranda issued by the Bush Administration concerning how the Department of Justice will proceed with respect to [...]
Read MorePractically, what does this mean? It means that I can be very accurate in determining what your federal sentence is going to be if you are convicted in federal court in the Southern District of Mississippi. As I have stated before, federal court is different than state court. In federal court, the sentencing battle is [...]
Read MoreOn April 13, 2010, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to amend the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Manual by deleting §4A1.1(e) (recency points). This paragraph of the Manual increased the number of “points” in determining a defendant’s criminal history category by 2 if the defendant committed the instant offense less than two years from release from imprisonment or on [...]
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