WASHINGTON – In an unusual expression of frustration, the judge who sentenced former White House aide Lewis Libby to 30 months in jail, only to see the sentence commuted by President Bush, said he was “perplexed” by the act of clemency.
In his first public comments on the matter, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton took issue with Bush’s statement that the prison sentence ordered for Libby last month was “excessive.” Walton defended the sentence, saying that he followed established legal precedents as well as a strict interpretation of federal sentencing guidelines that has been supported by Bush’s own administration.
“In light of these considerations … it is fair to say that the court is somewhat perplexed as to how its sentence could accurately be characterized as ‘excessive,’” Walton wrote.
“Although it is certainly the president’s prerogative to justify the exercise of his constitutional commutation of power in whatever manner he chooses, the court notes that the term of incarceration imposed in this case was determined after a careful consideration of each of the requisite statutory factors.”
The judge, who was appointed to the federal bench by Bush in 2001 in part because of his tough law-and-order approach to sentencing, made the comments in a lengthy footnote in an order issued Thursday.
Bush intervened in Libby’s case on July 2, hours after an appeals court refused to allow Libby to remain free while he appealed his perjury and obstruction of justice conviction in the CIA leak case. Bush commuted the jail sentence, but left intact a requirement that Libby serve two years’ supervised release and pay a $250,000 fine – which Libby has since paid.
In his order, Walton cited several legal precedents supporting his sentencing ruling, including a decision in June by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case known as Rita v. United States. The Supreme Court ruled in that case that a sentence that did not depart from the sentencing guidelines was inherently reasonable.
The 30-month sentence for Libby, Walton observed, was at the low end of federal sentencing guidelines. The Bush administration and the Justice Department, he pointed out, have been a strong proponent of those guidelines for judges, which are supposed to ensure that defendants in federal cases receive similar sentences for the same crimes.
“Indeed, only recently the president’s attorney general called for the passage of legislation to ‘restore the binding nature of the sentencing guidelines so that the bottom of the recommended sentencing range would be a minimum for judges, not merely a suggestion,’” Walton said.
At a news conference Thursday, Bush acknowledged publicly for the first time that someone in his administration perhaps leaked the name of former CIA official Valerie Plame to the news media – an act that launched the criminal investigation that resulted in Libby’s conviction.
“And, you know, I’ve often thought about what would have happened had that person come forth and said, ‘I did it.’ Would we have had this, you know, endless hours of investigation and a lot of money being spent on this matter?” Bush said.
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