Radley Balko, the libertarian investigative reporter, reports in his Washington Post column on a sentencing anomaly I was blissfully ignorant of before, and was a happier man for it. He writes…

Think the government must convict you of a crime before it can punish you for it? Think again.Most Americans probably believe that the government must first convict you of a crime before it can impose a sentence on you for that crime. This is incorrect: When federal prosecutors throw a bunch of charges at someone but the jury convicts on only some of those charges, a federal judge can still sentence the defendant on the charges for which he was acquitted. In fact, the judge can even consider crimes for which the defendant has never been charged.

Balko was writing about Jones v. United States,  in which the jury found three Washington, D.C.not guilty of a conspiracy to run an “open air” market for large quantities of illegal drugs on the streets of the nation’s capital, convicting them only of selling small quantities of the drugs, a relatively minor offense.  The judge, however—think about this, now—decreed that his sentence could also take into account the conduct that had led to the more serious conspiracy charge —that is, exactly the charges that the jury had acquitted them of—gave the three men sentences ranging from 180 to 225 months, while the crimes they were found guilty of committing would justify something in the range of 33 to 71 months. Continue reading →