By Luc Cohen, Karen Freifeld and Chris Prentice
MIAMI – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said on Thursday she would support revisiting sentencing guidelines for white collar crime because the current framework leads to uneven punishments.
The amount of money involved has more sway than the level of culpability, Jackson noted at an American Bar Association conference in Miami. “Fairness requires that similarly situated defendants be treated similarly.”
“I’d like to see the guidelines revisited as a whole,” she said to applause from the audience largely composed of white collar criminal defense lawyers.
Jackson, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, previously served on the independent U.S. Sentencing Commission, which develops guidelines for judges to consider as they impose sentences.
During her time on the commission, she said the recommended sentences in white collar cases “ratcheted way, way up” because of the rising amount of money involved in fraud schemes.
Judges are not required to impose a sentence within the guidelines. Some violent crimes and drug offenses carry mandatory minimum sentences, while white collar crimes do not, Jackson said.
Jackson was interviewed at the conference by former San Francisco U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey, her onetime classmate at Harvard Law School.
Asked about the court’s 6-3 decision last year finding broad immunity from criminal prosecutions for presidents, in a challenge brought by President Donald Trump, Jackson pointed to her written dissent arguing the decision was introducing inequality in the criminal justice system.
Regarding social relationships on the court, Jackson said she was closest in age and life circumstances with Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, and the two frequently talk about being working mothers.
Jackson, a musical theater aficionado, said Barrett threw her a party based on the Broadway play “Hamilton” after she joined the nation’s highest court.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen, Karen Freifeld and Chris Prentice in Miami; Editing by Richard Chang)
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