Federal Criminal Justice Clinic—Significant Achievements for 2023-24
The Federal Criminal Justice Clinic is the nation’s first legal clinic devoted to representing indigent clients charged with federal felonies, pursuing impact litigation through criminal cases in federal court, and spearheading systemic change within the federal criminal system to combat racial, economic, and other inequities. Professor Alison Siegler, the Clinic’s Founding Director, and Professor Judith Miller work together with students to advocate in these areas.
Freedom Denied Systemic Reform Project
Students working with Professor Siegler on the FCJC’s Freedom Denied Project have continued to drive systemic change nationally in the area of federal pretrial jailing and detention, building on the Clinic’s study, Freedom Denied: How the Culture of Detention Created a Federal Jailing Crisis (2022). In this report, the FCJC identified a federal jailing crisis and presented hard data to judges and other stakeholders about various ways in which people’s rights are violated during federal bail hearings. Since then, the FCJC has been pulling every possible lever to address this crisis, reduce federal jailing rates, and reduce the accompanying racial disparities.
In ten of the federal courts where the FCJC engaged in district-specific interventions, federal jailing rates decreased by fifteen percent on average. Over the five years since our work began, federal jailing rates have decreased by five percent nationwide. While it is difficult to know what part of the decrease is attributable to the Clinic’s efforts, many judges and policymakers have informed Professor Siegler that the Clinic’s work is fundamentally reshaping how the federal system addresses pretrial detention and release.
This year, the FCJC distributed a bound hard copy of our 300-page Freedom Denied report to 700 federal judges, including every Chief US District Court Judge and every US Magistrate Judge in the country who makes pretrial jailing decisions. We received many letters and emails from judges nationwide, thanking us and reflecting on our report as an excellent and practical resource for the judiciary. (The printing, binding, and mailing of the report was made possible by an additional and very generous gift from the Astor Street Foundation.)
In our report, the FCJC was the first to identify a massive access-to-justice problem, and our interventions on that issue are creating monumental change. Specifically, our investigation revealed that in one-quarter of the federal courts in this country, judges regularly detain people in jail without lawyers. This is a clear violation of federal laws that require the appointment of counsel during the first court hearing, known as the initial appearance.
The FCJC advocated to the Department of Justice and the Judicial Conference of the United States, and they responded by working with us to rectify the access-to-counsel problem. In 2023, the DOJ issued a new directive requiring federal prosecutors to recognize the statutory right to counsel. After that, FCJC students and Professor Siegler conducted an extensive additional investigation to identify the federal courts where the right-to-counsel crisis is most acute, and approached the Judicial Conference with our findings. In response, Judicial Conference committees ultimately issued a directive in March 2024 requiring federal judges to appoint counsel to represent every indigent defendant during their initial appearance hearing, stating: “Courts that do not currently ensure that every defendant has active representation by counsel during the initial appearance must comply with the governing statute and rules.” This is an enormous milestone.
While awaiting this directive, Professor Siegler published an op-ed in USA Today to further educate stakeholders about the crisis and spread nationwide attention and awareness, explaining: “Our [Clinic’s] findings document the shocking number of people denied public defenders at their first bail hearing, which virtually guarantees that they will be jailed rather than released home to their families.” In the wake of these changes, we have been heartened to learn that federal courts that for decades had an entrenched practice of locking defendants in jail without lawyers are now regularly appointing counsel.
The Clinic engaged in additional systemic change efforts to address the broader federal jailing crisis this year, including:
- Widely distributing the Clinic’s template motions for pretrial release via the Westlaw Forms database to ensure that federal criminal defense attorneys have access to effective legal tools.
- Continuing to train hundreds of judges, lawyers, pretrial services officers, and other stakeholders on our study, and providing legal and evidence-based tools for alleviating the crisis.
- The centerpiece of this year’s trainings was a presentation at the Seventh Circuit Judicial Conference, an upcoming panel at the Tenth Circuit Judicial Conference, and a multi-day national bail workshop for Federal Public Defenders.
- Additional speeches included presentations at the National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies 50th Annual Conference and Training, a presentation at the annual national conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and a speech at a conference organized by the Honorable Salvador Mendoza of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Retroactivity Project
Under Professor Judith Miller’s leadership, FCJC student teams represented four incarcerated clients in motions to have their sentences reduced under the newly passed Amendment 821 to the Sentencing Guidelines. The Sentencing Commission issued the retroactive Amendment in light of new data showing that two components of the Guidelines overstated certain individuals’ risk of recidivism. Under this Amendment, incarcerated individuals can ask the court to reduce their sentences to the low-end of their new, amended Guideline range. Once the court determines that the individual is eligible for a reduction, it applies the usual factors under the sentencing statute, 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), to determine whether a reduction is warranted.
The FCJC recognized that the Clinic could play an important role by representing clients who might be eligible for release after the change in the law. In this project, Clinic students used their outstanding research, writing, and investigation skills to help individuals in need of counsel push novel legal and factual issues posed by the new Amendment. As of early July 2024, one client has been released, one client’s sentence has been reduced, and two cases are still pending.
Two of the Clinic’s four cases were ultimately uncontested. Of the uncontested cases, our released client is now home with her family, after receiving a twenty-one-month sentence reduction. This was an especially sweet victory as the Clinic had previously represented this client at trial in 2019. In the second case, student advocacy persuaded the government to agree to the reduction. If granted, the motion will reduce our client’s sentence by nearly a year, to his mandatory minimum sentence.
As for the two contested pending cases, both present fascinating and important legal issues. In the first, students successfully persuaded the Court to grant the client an eighteen-month sentence reduction. This victory was an uphill battle. Both Probation and the government initially concluded that the client was ineligible for relief. Students nonetheless persuaded Probation to change its position, and the government then conceded eligibility after reading the students’ motion.
The student team argued that our client’s sentence should be reduced to account for dramatic changes in sentencing law that robbed him of the benefit of his earlier bargain, among other things. Years before we began representing him, our client received an agreed 150-month sentence in exchange for the government dropping additional charges that could have led to a thirty-year mandatory minimum sentence. The student team argued that our client was eligible for relief under a recent Supreme Court case, contrary to the government’s claims. Clinic students extensively researched the legal issues, documented our client’s post-sentencing success in prison, worked closely with our Clinic’s social worker, delved into the social science of age and recidivism, and drafted the motion.
After reading the Clinic’s briefing, the Court quickly concluded that our client deserved a sentence reduction, highlighting the same points the students raised in their briefing. Among other things, the Court observed that our client had obtained jobs requiring “technical expertise and trust,” and “demonstrate[d] a strong network of family and friends who vouch for his character.” The team looks forward to celebrating our client’s freedom once he is released.
The second contested case raises a circuit split over our client’s eligibility for relief in the first place. Our motion argues that Seventh Circuit case law conclusively entitles our client to relief. The § 3553(a) factors likewise support reducing our client’s grossly unfair sentence—he was sentenced twice for the very same conduct. The original federal judge intended for our client to serve a 196-month sentence, but a subsequent state sentence added an unexpected twenty-four months on top of that. Clinic students investigated and documented the double-sentencing, strategized over how to frame the issue, researched the circuit split, and drafted the motion. If the Clinic’s motion is granted, our client will receive a twenty-five-month sentence reduction.
Advocacy in Stash House Cases
FCJC students under Professor Siegler’s supervision partnered with a team led by Professor Erica Zunkel and students in the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic in filing a motion for compassionate release on behalf of a client currently serving a thirty-five-year sentence in a fake stash house case. This case builds on the Clinic’s prior federal impact litigation alleging unconstitutional racial discrimination in stash house cases in the Chicago area. The FCJC previously co-counseled cases on behalf of forty-three clients, nearly all of whom were released with time-served sentences. Additional people ensnared in the Chicago stash house operations were subsequently released thanks to compassionate release litigation led by Professor Zunkel.
Given these prior successes, the Clinics’ current client is one of just two people still serving a decades-long sentence for the stash house operation, which the federal government has now repudiated. He has already served seventeen years in federal prison. We are requesting his immediate release.
The Drugs on the Docket Podcast recently featured two episodes about the FCJC’s contributions to the stash house litigation. In Episode one, Professor Siegler discusses the Clinic’s pretrial litigation and how we ultimately helped shut down this racially discriminatory policing tactic nationwide. In Episode two, Professor Zunkel discusses the subsequent compassionate release litigation she led, which convinced judges to release eight other clients, most of whom were serving twenty-five-year sentences, sparing each approximately ten additional years in prison.