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 sentence.  It is a law that lets the court give you less time in jail, if you meet the law’s requirements.  Since 1995 over 60,000 federal drug offenders facing mandatory minimum sentences have gotten relief under the federal safety valve law.  This is a good thing,

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 charging decisions and advocacy during federal sentencing. I discussed here that federal sentencing is very different than Mississippi state court sentencing, and sometimes it is the biggest battle of your federal case.  So it is important to keep up with DOJ policy and how they are thinking as we develop a plan

Practically, 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 sometimes as big as the trial itself. A recent study shows that the Judges of the District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi - there are 11 in all - tend to sentence a convicted Defendant within the guideline range recommended by the U.S. Sentencing Commission

On 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 escape status from a prior offense.  What this means is that, in federal court, you were looking at more punishment if you committed a crime not long after being released from prison for another crime. The Sentencing Commission has decided to remove this provision from