Holder calls for fewer federal inmates | www.myajc.com

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. wants to focus on violent, career criminals especially in regards to drug-related crimes to decrease inmates overloading an expensive federal prison system.

But how much real impact that directive will have on Georgia cases remains unclear — especially in metro Atlanta where many of the narcotics trafficking cases involve Mexican cartels, the very people Holder wants to target.

“We generally focus almost exclusively on organizations, either Mexican cartels or gangs,” said U.S. Attorney Sally Yates, who heads up federal prosecutions in the Northern District of Georgia. While this will certainly have an impact on us — and an impact that I welcome — it is not as great an impact as in some non-cartel districts.”

But Georgia federal courts have tended to lean toward heavy sentences — perhaps because of cartel involvement — in drug trafficking cases. For instance, the Northern District’s average sentence for drug trafficking in 2012 was 102 months, compared with 72 months nationally. In the Middle District of Georgia, it was 84 months, and the Southern District’s average was 78 months, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s report.

Defense lawyer Bill McKenney said many federal judges in the state and elsewhere tend to follow often draconian sentencing guidelines even though in the past few years those guidelines were no longer binding as they had been previously. McKenney believes it would take federal legislation to reduce the impact of those guidelines.

“If you look across the board, our Northern District is pretty stringent when it comes to drug cases,” McKenney said. “There are a number of judges who still follow those guidelines, and they still treat them as if they were mandatory rather than recommendations.”

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