A SECOND CHANCE

A fair-minded federal judge revisits six convictions to see whether he and the system got it right.

Block, on the bench for decades, has seen two large movements come and go: in the first, in the 1980s, Congress mandated no-discretion guidelines for sentencing for federal crimes; in the second, after the Supreme Court held in 2005 that those sentencing guidelines were no longer mandatory, federal judges were permitted “to reconsider the appropriateness of a previously imposed sentence and to reduce that sentence, even if the original sentence was lawful.” In some instances, the reduction was permitted because the original crime had been reclassified to be less harshly punished; in others, it was up to Block and his colleagues on the bench to weigh all the facts in the matter and reevaluate. The cases considered and reconsidered here involve murder, drug trafficking, and child pornography; the most notorious, though, is that of Justin Volpe, a New York police officer sentenced to 360 months (it could have been life) for torturing Abner Louima in an incident of official abuse Block sees as a clear precursor to the murder of George Floyd more than 20 years later. Block’s reconsiderations are weighty, revealing a complex and justice-oriented legal mind at work, and some of his determinations will come as a surprise, Volpe’s case in particular. Because only 10% of prison inmates are in for federal crimes, Block urges individual states to establish sentence-review programs of their own. Moreover, he concludes, the entire system must be overhauled so that a sentence does not dog a person for the rest of his or her life. “It is not in anyone’s best interests,” he writes, sagely, “to consign ex-offenders to a permanent second-class status. Doing so will only lead to wasted lives, ruined families and more crime.”

Of particular interest to prison-reform activists and civil libertarians.