A reader rightly objects to a common weakness of newspaper reporting (I haven’t checked the details myself, but the general point is certainly right):
I know you like to point out where the press poorly reports on legal issues, and, at the risk of bringing a low-brow topic to your attention, I think major newspapers have done a lousy job of describing Martha Stewart’s potential sentence.
The LA Times tells us Ms. Stewart faces up to 20 years in prison. The Washington Post and New York Times make the same point by saying she faces up to 5 years on each of the four remaining counts against her.
It is true that there is a statutory maximum of five years for each of the counts, see 18 U.S.C. sections 1001 and 1505, but under the federal sentencing guidelines, she likely would not serve much more than a year in prison. Even if she is convicted of all four counts, she is probably in the 10-16 month range of the Guidelines, corresponding to Offense Level 12 for the most severe charge, obstruction of justice under Guideline 2J1.2. This calculation assumes that she has no prior criminal history, and that all four counts would be “grouped” — a reasonable assumption because the counts are probably “connected by a common criminal objective or constitut[e] part of a common scheme or plan” under Guideline 3D1.2(b). If she is acquitted of the obstruction counts but convicted of making false statements, she would be in the 0-6 month range and might not spend any time in prison. . . .
By the way, the base level offense for a conspiracy is the same as the underlying substantive offense, so, depending on what you all are conspiring towards, you could be facing a long federal prison sentence.
The Guidelines ranges are presumptive; it’s possible that a court might sentence her above (or below) the range, or other factors might come out at sentencing that may increase the range. Still, the estimated Guidelines range probably gives readers a much better sense of the likely sentence than does the “up to 20 years in prison” statutory maximum.
UPDATE: The New York Times story (from Reuters) at the URL given above now reports a sentencing guidelines estimate, but it’s a new (post-verdict) story, not the one my correspondent was referring to. Reader Eddie Sutton points out that this New York Times (non-Reuters, post-verdict) story likewise mentions the Guidelines. So some newspaper articles do indeed properly report the likely sentence under the guidelines, and not just the huge permissible statutory sentencing range (“up to 20 years”) — it’s just too bad that many others don’t.
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