Judge Frank Easterbrook urged the U.S. Sentencing Commission on Wednesday to loosen the federal sentencing guidelines so that judges waste less time in precisely determining ranges that may not matter anyway.
In testimony before the commission in Chicago, Easterbrook, chief judge of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said the commission’s “most important current task” is revamping the structure of the guidelines in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions that made the guidelines merely advisory. Now that judges can sentence outside the ranges set by the guideline tables, he said, they shouldn’t be spending so much time calculating those ranges in the first place.
