A cynical freakout stretching from Fox News to the Washington Post is utterly bogus.
slate.com
This coverage all repeats the same two claims: that D.C. is poised to slash prison sentences for violent offenses, and that these reforms will lead to more crime.
Neither of these claims is true.
The legislation that D.C. passed in January is
not a traditional reform bill, but the result of a 16-year process to overhaul a badly outdated,
confusing, and often arbitrary criminal code. The revision’s
goal was to modernize the law by defining elements of each crime, eliminating overlap between offenses, establishing proportionate penalties, and removing archaic or unconstitutional provisions. Every single change is justified in
meticulous reports that span thousands of pages. Each one was crafted with extensive public input and support from both D.C. and federal prosecutors. Eleventh-hour criticisms of the bill rest on misunderstandings, willful or otherwise, about its purpose and effect. They malign complex, technocratic updates as radical concessions to criminals. In many cases, criticisms rest on sheer legal illiteracy about how criminal sentencing actually works.
The D.C. bill is not a liberal wishlist of soft-on-crime policies. It is an exhaustive and entirely mainstream blueprint for a more coherent and consistent legal system.
Efforts to revise the District’s criminal code began in 2006. Lawmakers recognized that D.C.’s criminal laws were a mess—the product of legislation enacted by Congress in 1901 and tweaked in piecemeal fashion ever since. Countless jurisdictions across the country
overhauled their criminal codes beginning in the 1960s, and the city council acknowledged that D.C.’s was overdue for a fresh look. In 2016, the council finally commenced the project in earnest by creating the Criminal Code Reform Commission (CCRC). Councilmembers directed the commission to pore over the books, identify existing problems, and recommend comprehensive solutions.
The CCRC consisted of staff attorneys and an advisory group of experts. The latter included representatives from the U.S. attorney’s office and the D.C. attorney general’s office, separate entities that prosecute all crimes and misdemeanors committed in the District. The commission held dozens of public meetings over four years, then
published minutes and audio recordings from each one. In 2021, it published hundreds of pages of
recommendations accompanied by
thousands of pages of commentary. It also published
well over 2,000 pages of appendices containing every draft document,
study,
chart,
table,
and data compilation used in its work. This massive array of materials allows an interested reader to learn
exactly how the commission carried out its mandate in painstaking detail.
[the article from there goes into detail about how the revision effort fixes all sorts of unclarity and illogic in the current code with many examples. I think this one is particularly clear.]
Consider a crime that’s currently spiking in the District: carjacking. Under the current code, the maximum sentence for armed carjacking is 40 years. That’s the same penalty as second-degree murder, and more than double the penalty for second-degree sexual assault. It is wildly disproportionate to the offense by any standard. No one—not even the most violent and incorrigible offenders—is sentenced to 40 years for carjacking in D.C. The most conservative, tough-on-crime judge would never dream of handing down anywhere close to a 40-year sentence for a single carjacking. Rather, the harshest penalties handed down today run about 15 years. In recognition that some rare cases may warrant even longer sentences, the RCCA authorizes a 24-year maximum sentence for carjacking. That’s
nine years longer than the lengthiest sentences today.
