FSR, Volume 37, Issue 2: Sentencing "Boat Defendants"
Now available from Duke University Press
In the summer of 2024, the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law convened a workshop of practitioners and academics to discuss a groundbreaking data collection and original research project by Professors Kendra McSweeney, Mat Coleman, and Doug Berman. The project examined sentencing of “boat defendants,” a distinctive subset of drug couriers prosecuted in the federal criminal justice system.
McSweeney et al. describe “boat defendants” as “the hundreds of men who are intercepted every year by the U.S. Coast Guard . . . on cocaine-laden boats” on the high seas that depart from Central and South America headed for markets in the U.S. and Europe to sell and distribute the cocaine. These men “are brought to the United States for prosecution under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act. . . . Typically caught with hundreds of kilos of high-purity cocaine, they face serious federal penalties, including a mandatory minimum statutory sentence of ten years in prison.”
The authors built their “own dataset to ‘follow the defendants’ from the initial at-sea encounter with law enforcement through eventual deportation from the United States.” The novel data collection and analyses prompted the editors of Federal Sentencing Reporter (FSR) to have this project serve as a focal point for a full issue of FSR. As the issue editors indicate in their opening observations, “[t]his original and granular approach not only opens a distinctive window into boat defendant cases but also provides a means to explore sentencing outcomes differently and to examine what we may miss when reviewing conventional data only.”
The articles in the issue provide insights on how the criminal justice system struggles to prosecute the drug war effectively and justly through the story of a little known and rarely discussed front in that war.
Here is the Table of Contents from the issue, which also includes three unrelated, but still fascinating keynote addresses from some of the top sentencing thinkers and scholars on different aspects of sentencing policy.
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FSR, Volume 37, Issue 2: Sentencing “Boat Defendants”
A Remarkable Look at Sentencing for a Remarkable Set of Drug Defendants - by Douglas A. Berman; Steven L. Chanenson
The Challenge of Just Federal Sentencing for “Boat Defendants” - by Kendra McSweeney; Mat Coleman; Douglas A. Berman
Sentencing Research Without USSC Data: Strategies and Lessons Learned - by Michael Lissner and the Ohio State University Interdiction Lab
Location, Location, Location: How the Federal Sentencing System Can Cause Disparity in MDLEA Cases - by Nicole Hardin
Rocking the Boat: Lessons from a Study of the Federal Sentencing of Maritime Drug Traffickers - by Ryan D. King
The Conspiracy of Drug Weight and the Case of MDLEA Defendants - by Mona Lynch
The Weight - by Mark Osler
Sentencing “Boat Defendants”: Breaking the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s Monopoly on Gathering Data on Federal Sentencing Practices, and Why It Matters - by Jonathan J. Wroblewski
Richard P. Kern Memorial Award Honoree Keynote Speech, August 8, 2023 - Sara Andrews
