Results matching “first”

The DSM defines a delusion as a false belief based on an incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held.  If a defendant commits a homicide based on a delusion, can he avail himself of the defense of imperfect self-defense?  As Kent mentioned on Wednesday, the California Supreme Court recently held that the answer is "no" in the case of People v. Elmore.  The court bases it conclusion largely on the idea that an imperfect self-defense requires that a person's unreasonable beliefs must be caused by objective circumstances that he misperceives negligently and that delusional self-defense is properly considered in the realm of the insanity defense.  My sense is that this is mistaken and I want to show why.

Texas Murderer Released From Prison: A Texas man convicted of murder and sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1985 will be released from prison Thursday after serving less than half of his sentence.  Robert Arnold of KPRC Houston reports that the state is legally obligated to release David Port early because he was sentenced under a previously existing Texas law that allowed violent offenders to shorten their sentences by earning 'good time' credits.  The law was abolished in 1995, but a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court requires that the credits apply to murderers sentenced under the former law.  Current Texas law requires violent offenders convicted of a first-degree felony to serve at least half of their sentence before they are eligible for parole.

Louisiana Death Penalty Bill Dies: A bill to resolve challenges to Louisiana's death penalty process has been dropped after passing both houses.  Michelle Millhollon of The Advocate reports that House Bill 328 would prohibit legal action to force disclosure of the source of lethal injection drugs and would have allowed the state to to buy execution drugs from compounding pharmacies outside of Louisiana.  The bill's author, state Rep. Joseph Lopinto, disgruntled about the Governor's veto of another one of his bills, said he was dropping SB 328 bill because it was a short-term fix to an issue being which will be settled by the Supreme Court.    

CA High Court Upholds Death Sentence: California's state Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence for a man convicted of robbing and murdering a woman more than 16 years ago.  Parimal Rohit of Westside Today reports that Donald Ray Debose shot his victim and placed her in the trunk of her car before lighting it on fire and leaving the scene, the woman was rescued from the car but died five days later from the injuries she suffered.  Debose was also convicted of attempted murder for a similar attack he committed a week after the first killing, but his second victim was able to survive a gunshot wound to the head.

James Taranto has this column at WSJ, quoting a two-year-old Rolling Stone piece on Republican warnings that swapping terrorists for the deserter would be "Obama's Willie Horton moment."

Taranto also provides a reminder on the reality of the Willie Horton episode:

Willie Horton has become a sort of urban legend on the left, which seems to remember him vaguely as a victim of some sort of discrimination. In fact he is an actual man, now 62 years old and incarcerated in Maryland. He had previously served time in Massachusetts for the brutal 1974 murder of gas-station attendant Joseph Fournier. But in 1986 he was released on weekend furlough. He deserted and turned up the following year in Maryland, where he broke into a home, tied up and pistol-whipped the man of the house, and raped his fiancée.

In 1976, Gov. Dukakis had vetoed a bill to exclude first-degree murderers from the furlough program. But for that decision, Horton would have been unable to commit his subsequent crimes. Before Dukakis ever faced George H.W. Bush, Al Gore sought to hold him responsible for his furlough policy, which had been the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune.

Horton was a genuine example of a stupid soft-on-crime decision resulting in the violent victimization of innocent people.  The use of this episode by political opponents was completely justified.  It is entirely appropriate that voters understand the real consequences of these decisions to real people.

Pop quiz, class.  Who said this while getting his campaign underway in 2007:

I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law. The problem with this administration is that it has attached signing statements to legislation in an effort to change the meaning of the legislation, to avoid enforcing certain provisions of the legislation that the President does not like, and to raise implausible or dubious constitutional objections to the legislation. 

Today's opinion in Bond v. United States quotes Justice Felix Frankfurter's classic article, Some Reflections on the Reading of Statutes, 47 Colum. L. Rev. 527 (1947).  I have modified that title a bit for this post.

In Bond, the Court "ducked" the constitutional question of whether Congress had the authority to make a federal case out of an ordinary assault perpetrated by chemical means, which would normally be a purely state case, in order to implement the international Convention on Chemical Weapons.  The Court did so by finding that the statute doesn't actually reach Ms. Bond's conduct at all, in the process plowing some difficult ground in the field of statutory interpretation.

I had previously posted on this case in January 2013, when the Court took the case up, and last October, when the Court heard oral argument.  As previously noted, Carol Bond's "husband and best friend had an affair, resulting in the friend's pregnancy.  Bond was certainly justified in being angry and taking action, but poison was over the top.  That is a crime for which she should have been prosecuted and punished -- by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania" not the federal government.  Today the Supreme Court agreed unanimously, but disagreements as to why explain why this case took so long.

"Hard cases make bad law," it is often said.  This case exemplifies how bad laws make hard cases.  We begin with treaty negotiators botching the drafting process, with Congress meekly following suit.  The result is a mess. 

Investors Business Daily has this editorial:

As the attorney general again warns schools that even race-neutral discipline policies discriminate against black students, a study finds serial misbehavior "completely" explains the racial gap in suspensions.

The first-of-its-kind longitudinal study published in the Journal of Criminal Justice tracks black and white students from kindergarten through eighth grade, with the data set spanning the years 1998 to 2007.

It confirms the obvious: Differences in behavior -- namely, repeat classroom offenses -- explain differences in discipline, not racism by school officials or worse treatment of black offenders compared with similarly situated white offenders, as this race-obsessed administration has so recklessly alleged.

Citation and abstract follow the break.

Former NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave the commencement address at Harvard yesterday, including the following:

Repressing free expression is a natural human weakness, and it is up to us to fight it at every turn. Intolerance of ideas - whether liberal or conservative - is antithetical to individual rights and free societies, and it is no less antithetical to great universities and first-rate scholarship.

There is an idea floating around college campuses - including here at Harvard - that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice. There's a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism.

Think about the irony: In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left wing ideas. Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species. And perhaps nowhere is that more true than here in the Ivy League.

For those who missed today's House hearing but would like to take a look, the video is here.  Although the Task Force is interested primarily in examining the proliferation of non mens-rea crimes as the regulatory state gets bigger and nastier, today's hearing was about the mandatory minimum debate.  The Congressmen make their opening statements, followed by the witnesses, of whom I was called upon first, starting at about minute 29:00.

High Court Rejects Death Penalty Appeal: The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Texas death row inmate Duane Buck's most recent appeal.  AP reports that his lawyers claimed in a statement yesterday, "His death sentence is the product of pervasive racial discrimination."  The claim arises from a statement by Buck's own expert witness.  In context, the statement was simply a reference to the demographic facts that the murder rate is higher among black men than white men and higher among men than women.  See this post from 2011, regarding a last-minute stay granted by the Supreme Court at that time.

CA Governor Loses Prison Oversight Appeal: A federal appeals court has rejected California Governor Jerry Brown's most recent appeal challenging a court ruling that required him to give a three-month warning before seeking to end federal oversight of the state's prison system.  Paige St. John of the Los Angeles Times reports that medical care within the California prison system has been run by a court-appointed official since being placed under a federal receivership in 2006.  Governor Brown appealed the decision in an effort to try and regain control of the $2.2 billion healthcare system.

Georgia Sets Execution Date for Convicted Killer: A Georgia man sentenced to death for raping and murdering an Atlanta teenager has been scheduled to be executed on June 17 after spending more than two decades on the state's death row.  Kate Brumback of the Associated Press reports that Marcus Wellons raped and murdered his 15-year-old neighbor in August 1989 after the young girl said goodbye to her mother and headed off to school for the day.  If the execution is carried out as scheduled, it will be the state's first execution in nearly 18 months.  

How many cases will yesterday's decision in Hall v. Florida actually impact?  Lizette Alvarez and John Schwartz have this article in the NYT estimating "10 to 20," citing anti-death-penalty law professor John Blume for that estimate.  (The article doesn't identify Blume as an advocate for one side on this issue, but he is.) "The death row inmates in this category would generally have I.Q.'s of between 71 and 75. Inmates in that category should now be able to ask for a new hearing that would take into consideration other evidence and a broader range of I.Q. tests."

There are a couple of points to note here.  First, it appears a prominent advocate for the other side implicitly agrees that Hall does not require reconsideration in cases where the inmate's test scores are above 75.  My prior post and the comments to it discussed whether Hall might extend to murderers whose scores are consistently above 75.  I don't think it does yet -- and apparently Blume agrees -- though the Court may still go there in the future.

Does everyone in the 71 to 75 twilight zone automatically get a new hearing?  If that means evidentiary hearing, I don't think so.  Hall himself, for example, put on the experts who testified to the same thing they would testify to after the Supreme Court's decision.  I don't see any reason why the trial judge cannot enter a new decision on the same record, considering the margin of error as the Supreme Court directs.  I expect his decision would be the same.  The state might want a new evidentiary hearing to put on the evidence it didn't think was necessary before, but Hall has already had his shot.

Kent discusses Hall v. Florida with the precision and analysis characteristic of him. In one respect, however, I dissent:  I think he gives the opinion too much credit.

In the 2002 case of Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decided that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides an absolute exemption from capital punishment to a person diagnosable as mentally retarded. I do not doubt that their was a consensus to that effect for persons with moderate or more severe levels of retardation, which is what most people think of when the hear the word "retarded."  I very much doubt that most people would agree as to mild retardation, if they understood the level of functioning that classification represents.

At the same time Atkins found a consensus on that underlying rule, it noted there was "serious disagreement about ... determining which offenders are in fact retarded."  That would seem to mean that there is no constitutional constraint and states can choose their methods, at least within reason.  Today in Hall v. Florida, a bare 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court decided that Florida's method of making that determination is unconstitutional.

Is today's decision a one-time correction of a rule that was, to be frank, hard to defend scientifically?  Or is the opening of a long line of decisions to judicially micromanage the retardation determination, with each twist in the road reaching back to further delay or possibly deny justice in cases fairly tried in accordance with the law in effect at the time?

CQ Roll Call published an article yesterday about the Smarter Sentencing Act, now somewhere in limbo in the Senate.  The CQ piece is behind a paywall, but I have attempted  to reproduce it after the break.  It does a balanced and informative job of describing where things stand, including a note on what I view as something of a generational divide.  (I'm quoted in the piece).

I would put a slightly different spin than Bill Otis on the notable fact that the "average age of the Republicans who voted for the [SSA] in committee earlier this year was 45 [while the] average age of the Republicans who opposed it was 69." I would say that supporters of the bill understand that new political and legal realities may call for changing laws passed decades ago, whereas opponents of the bill see little need to update these sentencing laws for modern times.

Christopher Evan Hubbart violently raped 40 or so women starting in the 1970's. Eventually, the system took it seriously enough to send him off to a mental hospital. Now, over the state's objections, he has been ordered released by a California judge.

Hubbart will wear a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week GPS monitor on his ankle and will be accompanied by security people every time he goes out in public for the first six months to a year of his release, [L.A. County District Attorney Jackie] Lacey said. He will be transported to therapy sessions twice a week.

Ex-Stephen Reinhardt clerk and hard-core liberal Harvard law professor David Barron was confirmed by the Senate today for a seat on the First Circuit.  He could not have made it through under the filibuster rules that Harry Reid ended in order to allow the President to pack the DC Circuit.  As we now see, it's not just the DC Circuit that will be headed downhill.

AP reports:

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- O.J. Simpson's lawyers submitted a supersized appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court, seeking the former football star's release from prison and a new trial in his 2007 Las Vegas armed-robbery case.

The lawyers met a midnight Wednesday deadline to submit a request for the court to review Simpson's claim that 2008 trial in Las Vegas was tainted by his fame and notoriety following his 1995 acquittal in Los Angeles in the deaths of his ex-wife and her friend.

*                                      *                                  *

The appeal stems from arguments rejected last year by Clark County District Judge Linda Marie Bell that Simpson's trial attorney botched Simpson's trial and first appeal to the state Supreme Court, the only appeals court in Nevada.

The case is Simpson v. State, No. 64529.  It is an appeal from the District Court's denial of postconviction relief.  It goes to the Nevada Supreme Court because Nevada has no intermediate appellate court.  The direct appeal was No. 53080, affirmed in 2010.

John Walters and Tom Riley suggest in the Weekly Standard how Big Dope might follow Big Tobacco off the tort liability cliff:

[C]ommunities are not helpless before [the legalization] onslaught. Even when the criminal law has been compromised at the state level, resort to civil procedure might offer protection. Legal or illegal, marijuana injures users--researchers call it a "neurotoxin"--and those who distribute it for profit are liable for its known effects. Its production and distribution, after all, are still federal crimes. America's tort attorneys could respond by suing drug retailers for the harm done by their product to particular addicts, then collecting damages for the clients and legal fees for themselves.

*******************************

If you think trial lawyers made a windfall on tobacco, just wait until they get a handle on marijuana. The scientific and medical evidence against marijuana now dwarfs what we knew about tobacco at the time of the surgeon general's report of 1964. No warning label in the world could shield marijuana growers and sellers from the tsunami of tort liability they should face from distributing a product with so many known harmful effects. 

As noted in yesterday's and today's News Scans, the execution of Missouri murderer Russell Bucklew has been on-again, off-again yesterday and today.  Missouri apparently sets its executions "old school" with a particular calendar day allowed, in this case today, May 21.  So, the originally planned time was 12:01 a.m., the first minute it was officially May 21.  The last available time is midnight tonight minus the time it takes to perform the execution.

Jim Salter and Jim Suhr report for AP:

BONNE TERRE, Mo. (AP) -- The U.S. Supreme Court weighed arguments Wednesday over whether a Missouri inmate's rare vascular condition would cause him great suffering during what would be the nation's first execution since last month's botched case in Oklahoma.

Russell Bucklew had been scheduled to be put to death at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday for the 1996 killing of a man during a violent crime spree, but Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito blocked the execution late Tuesday and the full court was considering the matter.

As the clock ticked Wednesday - by law, Missouri has a 24-hour window to carry out a scheduled execution - attorneys for Bucklew and the state parried in court filings about his medical circumstances.

New York Experiencing Surge in Heroin Sales: At a time when Attorney General Eric Holder is pushing for shorter sentencing for convicted drug dealers, New York City is experiencing what law enforcement officers say is the highest level of heroin trafficking in more than 20 years.  J. David Goodman of the New York Times reports that nearly 35 percent of heroin seized by the DEA nationwide since October was confiscated in New York, in years prior, that state was accounting for roughly 20 percent of heroin seizures.  Along with an increase in trafficking, law enforcement officers have also noted a sharp increase in the number of overdose deaths as a result of the wide availability of heroin.

FL Man's 1,000 Year Sentence Upheld: A Florida appeals court has upheld the 1,000 year sentence handed down to a Jacksonville man convicted of raping three women as a juvenile more than 30 years ago.  David Boroff of the New York Daily News reports that attorneys for Arthur Franklin challenged his 1,000 year sentence citing a 2010 Supreme Court decision that made it illegal to sentence juveniles to life without parole unless they had been convicted of murder.  Franklin, who was 17 at the time of the crime, kidnapped and raped the women 31 years ago, resulting in 20 felony convictions including armed sexual battery, armed robbery and aggravated assault.

Judge Denies Request for Stay of Execution: A federal judge has refused to issue a stay of execution for a Missouri inmate scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday.  Kevin Murphy of Reuters reports that 46-year-old Russell Bucklew, convicted of first-degree murder and rape in 1996, filed a motion to halt his execution based on the claim that he has a rare health condition that may cause him to experience extreme pain and suffocation as a result of lethal injection.  The judge also denied Bucklew's request to have his execution videotaped to record what he believes will be 'evidence of his suffering'.  Update: Mark Berman reports in the WaPo that a stay was granted by a panel of the Eighth Circuit, vacated by that court en banc, and granted again by Justice Alito (Circuit Justice for the Eighth) pending further order of the Supreme Court.

The "heckler's veto" strategy for obstructing justice in the worst murder cases took a hit yesterday.  The Georgia Supreme Court rebuffed an attack on a state law that permits compounding pharmacies to supply the drugs needed for a humane execution without getting a deluge of hate mail and a pack of angry demonstrators outside their offices.

The Eleventh Circuit has described the crimes of Warren Lee Hill thusly:

In 1990, while serving a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend, Hill murdered another person in prison. Using a nail-studded board, Hill bludgeoned a fellow inmate to death in his bed. As his victim slept, Hill removed a two-by-six board that served as a sinkleg in the prison bathroom and forcefully beat the victim numerous times with the board about the head and chest as onlooking prisoners pleaded with him to stop. Although in jail for life for one murder, Hill continued to kill.

Given that a second life sentence would be meaningless, the State of Georgia has two choices to punish Hill for the second murder: (1) death, or (2) no punishment.  The State has made the obvious choice, but Hill has managed to avoid his deserved punishment to date.  His latest claim is that the State must disclose the suppliers of the lethal injection drugs, and he got an injunction from a state trial court on that claim.  Yesterday, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed in a very thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion.

We've all heard by now that prosecutors charge innocent defendants by the hundreds or thousands, then force them to forego their right to a trial by their peers. The guilty pleas thus produced don't reflect actual guilt, there being none (or, maybe, in an eensy-teensy number of cases, just a little).  They reflect the fact that prosecutors, basically because of character defects (defects that mysteriously vanish when they move on to make actual money as defense lawyers) can threaten defendants with draconian sentences.  Such mind-bending punishment makes it just too risky for Mr. Innocent to go to trial.

A federal jury convicted  Mustafa Kamel Mustafa this afternoon of providing material support to terrorism.  The story is here.

Massachusetts prides itself on its progressive legal system.  No death penalty (which is why blood-soaked child killer Dzhokar Tsarnaev can face the death penalty only in federal district court).  "Medical" pot available, with recreational pot apparently coming soon.

Public defenders and prosecutors in Massachusetts are so poorly paid that they are among the working poor, according to a study by the state bar association.

Assistant district attorneys in the state earn $37,500 a year and public defenders earn $40,000, according to the study (PDF) by the bar association's Blue Ribbon Commission on Criminal Justice Attorney Compensation. Starting pay for these lawyers should be raised to $55,0000, the report said.

"Sadly, the lowest-paid person in a Massachusetts courtroom is a newly minted assistant district attorney," the report says. "Working up from the bottom, the next-lowest-paid employee in the courthouse is the custodian. And the third-lowest-paid person in the courtroom is the public defender."

NY Rape/Murderer Gets Life Sentence: A New York man has been found guilty and sentenced to life without parole for raping a young girl and killing her mother after cutting off his court-ordered GPS ankle monitor last year.  The Associated Press reports that 30-year-old David Renz, who was wearing the GPS monitor as a condition of pretrial release for federal pornography charges, carjacked the woman and her 10-year-old daughter as they left a gymnastics class.  Renz strangled and stabbed the woman as she fought him off in an attempt to stop him from raping her daughter, the young girl was able to escape the vehicle and was soon rescued by a passing motorist. 

New Jersey Governor Signs Bill to Increase Penalties for Sex Offenders: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has signed legislation which would require longer sentences for sexual predators who target children.  Matt Friedman of The Star-Ledger reports that the bill, known as the Jessica Lunsford Act (A892), will take effect immediately will require judges to sentence anyone convicted of aggravated assault against a child under the age of 13 to a minimum sentence of 25 years in prison without parole.  The law was named for a 9-year-old Florida girl who was raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender in 2005.

Mom Convicted of Murdering Children Sentenced to Life: A Florida jury has found a woman guilty of two counts of first-degree murder for the shooting deaths of her children in 2011.  The Associated Press reports that jurors took less than two hours to find 53-year-old Julie Schenecker guilty of murdering her teenage son and daughter, a crime she claims was committed due to her struggle with a severe mental illness.  Shortly after the jury reached their verdict, Schenecker was sentenced to two consecutive life terms .

I wrote earlier about how the Administration's on-the-fly (and false) explanation of the Benghazi murders led to the imprisonment  --  on a "parole violation"  -- of Nakoula Nakoula.  Mr. Nakoula had the misfortune of having produced the snarky Internet video, the "Innocence of Muslims," that got dragooned as the State Department's excuse for the attack on our embassy.  The video whipped up a spontaneous mob, so the tale would be told.

Chuck Grassley is the Ranking Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and has taken the lead in fighting the Smarter Sentencing Act.  Although the Act made it out of Committee by 13-5, Senator Grassley has not been without his victories.  He introduced successful amendments to add three new mandatory minimums for crimes other than drugs, proving  --  it would seem to me  --  that the Committee remains of the wise view that judges simply are not to be trusted with 100% discretion 100% of the time.  Congress has every right and reason to constrain judges who simply can't or won't see straight on sentencing issues.  (Those who think that no such judges exist haven't spent a lot of time in court).

Death Sentence Upheld for Double-Murderer: A divided Ohio Supreme Court upheld the death sentence for a Cincinnati man convicted of murdering two teenage girls in 2010.  WLWT 5 reports that Anthony Kirkland was convicted of aggravated murder and attempted rape for the killings of a 14-year-old girl in 2006 and a 13-year-old girl in 2009, prior to trial, Kirkland pled guilty to two additional murders he had committed and was given two life sentences.  Kirkland was appealing his death sentence amid claims that statements made by the prosecutor during the sentencing phase of his trial pressured jurors into returning a death sentence.

Thousands of Criminals Freed While Awaiting Deportation: A report released on Monday by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based advocacy group, has revealed that the Obama administration has released thousands of convicted criminals while they were awaiting deportation proceedings.  Fox News reports that in 2013, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)  released more than 36,000 "convicted criminal aliens" who represented a total of 88,000 convictions.  While most of the convictions were for lower-level or non-violent offenses, a large number were much more serious in nature including 193 homicides, 426 sexual assaults, and 303 kidnappings.  ICE has responded to the report, and said that many of the criminals were released under restrictions like GPS monitoring and supervision.

Convicted Mass Murderer Appeals Death Sentence: A Pennsylvania man convicted and sentenced to death for murdering four people in 2010 is appealing his sentence to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that the verdict slip presented to jurors was unfairly written.  Riley Yates of The Morning Call reports that 40-year-old Michael Ballard, who had been on parole at the time of the murders for a previous killing, brutally stabbed to death his former girlfriend and two members of her family as well as a neighbor tried to help.  Ballard pled guilty to all four charges of first-degree murder, but believes jurors should have been made aware of his alleged brain damage and abusive childhood prior to sentencing.

You better believe it.

In the last post, I noted that 29 former top leaders of the Justice Department have gone on record opposing the Smarter Sentencing Act.  Over at the Sentencing Law & Policy, Prof. Doug Berman wonders whether the appearance of their letter today is more likely to mean (1) that the final nail has been driven in the the SSA's coffin, or (2) that the SSA has more life than it might have seemed recently, since it's still supported by my friend Ted Cruz and a few other Senate Republicans, and is but one of a number of items in a momentum-gathering mosaic looking to bring about shorter sentences and less use of incarceration.  As Doug puts  it:

I continue to find the discussion and debate over the SSA an intriguing (and valuable?) distraction from all the other arguably much-more-consequential federal sentencing developments that are afoot. The fact that prominent Tea-party leaders in the GOP like Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz all support significant federal sentencing reform, the fact that state marijuana reforms seem to be continuing apace, the fact that the US Sentencing Commission has voted to lower most of the drug guidelines, the fact that most federal sentences are now outside the guidelines, and the fact that DOJ and Prez Obama are working hard on clemency reform all will be likely impacting federal sentencing realities more than whether or not the SSA is passed by Congress. (This is not to say that the SSA is not important or potentially consequential, but it is to say that a whole host of much broader forces are changing the dynamics of modern federal sentencing policies and practices.)

In a letter released today, 29 former leaders in the Department of Justice, the DEA, and US Attorney's Offices around the country urge Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell to defeat the Smarter Sentencing Act if and when it comes up in the Senate.