As reported here, the "Senate on Monday overwhelmingly confirmed a former Bush White House lawyer who spent the last decade on the U.S. Sentencing Commission to a seat on a Washington, D.C. federal court." Here is more on the new Judge and her sentencing background:
The Senate sent Dabney Friedrich to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia with a 97-3 vote on Monday night, with only Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., voting against her.
Friedrich spent three years as associate counsel to former President George W. Bush before he appointed her to the United States Sentencing Commission in December 2006.
As a member of the panel, Friedrich helped craft sentencing guidelines and voted to retroactively apply the guidelines that reduced the disparity in sentences for crimes involving crack and powdered cocaine.
Speaking at the meeting when the commission voted to change the guidelines, Friedrich called the disparity in punishments for the two drugs an “injustice” and said the move would help “restore a greater fairness in sentencing.”
Friedrich told Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., in a written response to questions submitted after her nomination hearing that her time on the Sentencing Commission would be an asset to her on the bench. “I believe that my experience as a commissioner provides me with insight into the aims and objectives of the federal sentencing regime that will prove valuable when I confront sentencing decisions,” Friedrich wrote to Durbin in August.
Friedrich worked as a federal prosecutor in both California and Virginia before moving to Congress, where she served as counsel to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Former President Barack Obama renominated Friedrich to the Sentencing Commission in 2010 and she served on the commission until her term expired at the end of last year. Trump nominated Friedrich to the D.C. federal bench in June after Republicans prevented Obama’s choice from taking the seat during the blockade they put up against judicial nominees in the last year of his term.
Interestingly, the US District Court for the District of Columbia now has three former US Sentencing Commissioners among its members as Judge Friedrich now joins Chief Judge Beryl Howell and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on this important court.
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