A recent paper, (How Much) Do Mandatory Minimums Matter?, by Stephanie Holmes Didwania (Temple), takes another shot at a persistent challenge in the growing sentencing literature. As the paper's abstract makes clear, "Understanding the relationship between mandatory minimums and sentencing outcomes is often difficult due to the endogeneity of mandatory minimum charging." To parse this challenge the paper exploits a quasi-natural experiment generated by a sweeping policy change imposed by an August 2013 directive from then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that instructed all U.S. attorneys to cease charging mandatory minimums in drug cases for certain low-level offenders. As the paper makes clear, however, Holder's charging policy change "did not work." More specifically, while Holder's policy change did, in fact, succeed in reducing mandatory minimum charging, when it came to actual sentencing outcomes, however, the effect was "modest."
What explains the "curious" result? The paper hypothesizes that the targeted beneficiaries of the Holder policy change in 2013--certain low-level federal drug offenders--were, in effect, already receiving sentence reductions through prosecutors' use of "safety-valve and substantial assistance reductions" prior to 2013. To better achieve the goal of reducing actual sentences for certain low-level federal drug defendants, the paper suggests that "advocates ... should expand their efforts to promoting interventions that reach more serious offenders and on reforming the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines.”
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