Judges in the Eastern and Southern districts of New York are among the country’s most adventurous when it comes to sentencing defendants outside the ranges set by the “advisory” U.S. Sentencing Guidelines.
Thirteen months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking decisions in United States v. Booker and United States v. Fanfan, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), statistics show that many New York judges, who had a reputation of being relatively liberal even before Booker, are happily flexing the new-found discretion those decisions conferred on them.
