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Notes -
I think I understand the disagreement here. First, I would state my position on whether or not Epps is a fed is almost entirely divorced from whether or not he was treated leniently. That can sometimes be a factor, but it's barely relevant here. On whether or not he was treated leniently, I agree with your point that there's enough of a spread for outlier cases that it's difficult to do a 1:1 comparison. Defendants are not cloned mimes after all.
For what I understand you focus significantly on how rare his charges are, and I should have said this more explicitly but the specific statute he's charged with barely matters because he entered a plea. The fact that he plead guilty 2 days after his indictment was filed indicates his plea deal was negotiated ahead of time. Two days is not enough to send out a summons notice, and federal court definitely does not move fast enough to have allowed a plea deal negotiation to take place. If a defendant already agrees to plead, the prosecutor doesn't really care which specific statute they plead guilty to, because fictional pleas are very very common (and legally sanctioned!). In my work, prosecutors regularly ask me to suggest a charge my client would plead to.
It's less the specific charge -- you note fictional pleas, but even beyond that the relevant statutes are just vague and open-ended enough that a good half-dozen can fit pretty easily -- and more the behavior I'm trying to isolate down, and with things like charges and sentences are the closest proxies that the USAO DC page you linked actually exposes. I bring 40 USC 5104(e)(2)(G) and 18 USC 1752(a)(1) because they're the only other convictions that have similar or lesser sentencing that what Epps faced in the entire spreadsheet.
In an ideal world, we'd filter by what the alleged (or actual) behaviors were, but I tried throwing a couple scripts at the full USAO DC setup, and between missing pdfs (Andrew Morgan's courtlistener page makes him look like he got slapped more for his political views... but only because his sentencing request is still pacer-locked; taking it from other sources makes clear he behaved unusually poorly), heavily obfuscated descriptions, or bizarre descriptions... well, I got those three I mentioned last post out who didn't enter the capital building proper, but I also got another ten that did go into the building, and I'm 90%+ sure there's some false negatives.
((And I'm still finding typos and misfiles and stupid case citation errors, but that's more typical.))
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