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FWIW, I vaguely remember seeing or reading articles claiming severe treatment of the J6 prisoners (held in solitary, etc), and vague claims of wildly disproportionate punishments for extremely minor offenses. After seeing your posts on the topic the last few days, I am moved to concluding those were probably disingenuous partisan bullshit.
And I still almost made a fool of myself with an instinctive "Well, what if...", but luckily I double checked the date and realized my mistake. The corollary to this is that it's hard to believe that J6 was less than two years ago. It's been talked about so much that it feels much longer.
Well these things are true, at least for some defendants. The three names I highlighted above kind of fit the mold, especially Hale's sentence. The issue is how much of a trend you can draw from these individual cases. If someone is primed not to care or think about the criminal justice system and their first exposure is seeing people they feel a kinship with get hammered with several years in prison, it's reasonable to be aghast by what appears to be politically motivated. For basically everyone who had a passing familiarity with the system, the response was basically "lol welcome to america".
Yes, the criminal justice system sucks for anyone who gets sucked into the system. This is because the system has been hardened by decades of dealing with career criminals who intimidate witnesses and rules-lawyer the shit out of things using Warren court precedents.
In your average regular criminal defense case, the defendant isn't only guilty as all hell of the crime he is accused of, it is "common knowledge" that he's guilty of a half dozen other crimes, typically more severe than what is being charged, along with another dozen + shoplifting, petty theft sort of crimes that will never even be contemplated of being brought. Meanwhile, while there are plenty of repeat miscreants in the J6 crowd, there are also people like Jessica and Joshua Bustle who got home confinement then supervision. The various filings unfortunately don't include a sentencing guidelines rundown because they plea deal went around that, but all available evidence indicates they were an otherwise law abiding couple who are the type that gets nervous about going to traffic court after getting caught in a speed trap going 45 in a 30.
In other words, an entirely different class of people than the system is designed to deal with. Typically a person in position to get home confinement either has scammed people out of millions of dollars, or has a case officer report that details a laundry list of uncharged conduct. Home confinement is historically defined as a 1:2 ratio compared to prison. See. Chapter IV. Such long probationary and supervision sentences could also be seen as unreasonable considering they are first time offenders, depending on the terms of probation. While true of all probation terms, most probies don't care for much other than you reporting when you are supposed to report, pissing when you are supposed to piss, and keeping current your residence and employment. The Bustles, like many other J6 defendants, are not from a criminally inclined and aligned community. Their probation officers are disproportionately likely to receive tips from "concerned community members" when they share drinks at a bar, or wine in a house.
TLDR: As I've stated before in other contexts, we actually NEED a 2-tiered justice system because the current system is incapable of treating fairly people who are genuinely caught up in it, while also incapable to properly policing and punishing career criminals.
Here's the government's sentencing memo (I found it by googling "joshua bustle courtlistener"). The sentencing guidelines don't apply to misdemeanors.
I appreciate that you included a link, but that's a report from 1987. Home confinement happens all the time nowadays, for both pretrial detention and sentencing, and is usually enforced by an ankle bracelet. It's the absolute norm for my misdemeanor cases (and sometimes felonies if I secure a good deal), and the ranking typically goes from community service > home detention > jail. Prosecutors are dismissive of home detention because they think it's akin to a vacation, which I kind of understand. I wouldn't expect you to know all this, but I'm confused as to where you got the impression that this is reserved to only multi-million scammers. For a recent reference, BOP released a bunch of federal prison inmates into home confinement because of the pandemic. It's a widely used sanction.
Yeah, that is a point against you. If you think its acceptable to put rapists and burglars on home confinement, that means you think those are in the same tier of crime as picketing congress. I disagree with that idea fundamentally, and also would posit the idea of covid releases was more related to the desire to decarcerate than it was legitimate covid policy.
With regards to your link, the government memo supports my theory that these were just normal people caught up in a system intended for evil people.
Zero points. My god. I externed for a judge for most of law school, no one had zero points.
Among white collar people or otherwise productive people, you generally have to achieve that level of criminality to be noticed at all by the feds. Almost everyone I saw sentenced to confinement was a white collar criminal who posed zero threat to anyone. I never saw a single political protest case go to sentencing in a large city with lots of them.
I'm really having trouble following your thread because your responses seem to respond to a new collateral topic in each iteration. The point you made above, as I understand it, was to present home confinement as something reserved for high-profile cases by citing to a manual from 1987. When I pointed out that no actually, home confinement is the norm for low-level crimes nowadays, and also if you want a more recent reference point for how it works at the federal level you can look at what the Bureau of Prison did because of the pandemic, you shifted your point. You then claim that I think rapists and burglars are on the same tier as picketing congress. What? No, that's not the point at all. And this is getting into quibbling territory, but the feds virtually never deal with rapes and burglaries unless those things happen on federal property or somehow involve crossing state lines. And besides, the BOP pandemic home confinement release plan explicitly disqualified sex offenses.
This is so weird. Of course people have zero points. Literally everybody in the entire world is born with zero points. All that zero points means in what you quoted is how many prior convictions that person has under USSG §4A1.2. That means that even hardened criminals at some point had zero points.
True, but you never see them in federal court, or if you did they would probably be subject to an upward departure under 4A1.3
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