This lengthy new CNN article, Headlined "Compassionate release became a life-or-death lottery for thousands of federal inmates during the pandemic," takes a deep dive into the realities of compassionate release processes and outcomes. Here are excerpts:
Judge Danny Reeves ... has denied compassionate release motions from at least 90 inmates since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, a CNN review of court records found. In Reeves' district, the Eastern District of Kentucky, judges granted about 6% of compassionate release motions in 2020 and the first half of 2021, according to data released by the US Sentencing Commission this week. In some judicial districts, the approval rate was even lower.But elsewhere in the country, compassionate release is a different story: Nearly 50% of compassionate release motions decided by the federal court in Massachusetts and more than 60% decided by the court in Oregon were approved during the same time period -- including some for inmates with far less serious medical conditions.... [The image shows darker colors based on percentage of motions for compassionate release that were granted, by judicial district.]
Federal judges in all of these districts are applying the same laws, which allow compassionate release in "extraordinary and compelling" cases. But those wide disparities show that whether defendants get released early during the pandemic has had almost as much to do with which courts are hearing their motion as it does with the facts of their cases, legal advocates and researchers say.
The compassionate release process, expanded by Congress in a landmark 2018 criminal justice reform bill, has acted as a safety valve for the federal prison system during the pandemic, with more than 3,600 inmates being released in 2020 and the first half of 2021. But it has given judges broad discretion to interpret which sentences should be reduced, leading to a national patchwork of jarringly different approval rates between federal courts.
The reasons behind the disparities have to do with variations in sentence length and legal representation for inmates, as well as differing approaches between more liberal and conservative judges, according to interviews with more than a dozen lawyers, advocates and experts studying compassionate release.
More broadly, the percentage of motions granted nationwide has fallen this year, as judges and Department of Justice lawyers have been pointing to inmates' vaccination status as a reason to oppose their release. "Judges are looking at the same law and policy but interpreting it differently," said Hope Johnson, a researcher with the UCLA School of Law who's studied compassionate release cases. "There's an arbitrariness in the way these decisions are being made."...
Overall, 17.5% of compassionate release motions were granted in 2020 and the first six months of 2021, newly released sentencing commission statistics show. But that rate ranged from a low of 1.7% in the Southern District of Georgia, where all but four of 230 motions were denied, to a high of 77.3% in the District of Puerto Rico, where 17 of 22 motions were granted.
Judge Charles Breyer, the only current member of the sentencing commission, said in an interview that he thought the lack of updated compassionate release guidelines was exacerbating the wide disparities between districts. He said he would like the commission to pass a new standard urging judges to take "the pernicious effect of Covid" into account in deciding compassionate release cases. "You need a national standard," Breyer told CNN, adding that without one, "it creates a vacuum and it creates uncertainty, and most importantly it creates disparity."
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