Pam Bondi’s Justice Department: A criminal defendant’s dream |
Pam Bondi’s Justice Department: A criminal defendant’s dream
Ordinarily, a federal court sentencing pursuant to a plea agreement is a pre-packaged, check-the-boxes sort of exercise. Federal sentencing guidelines even provide the judge with a structured framework for determining the appropriate punishment. It’s really hard to mess it up.
But that’s what the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office managed to do in a recent sentencing hearing in U.S. v. Villafane, a child pornography case. The hearing was a microcosm of the turmoil and incompetence in Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department that is alienating federal judges and jeopardizing thousands of criminal cases.
Before sentencing the defendant, District Judge Zahid Quraishi, a Biden appointee, pressed Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosenblum on why he had entered into a lenient plea agreement despite the shocking images recovered by the FBI from the defendant’s devices. Rosenblum admitted that he had finalized the binding plea agreement with the defendant’s lawyer without waiting for the FBI to complete its forensic analysis.
“How did this screwup happen?” Quraishi asked. “How did you execute a plea agreement without knowing all the evidence on the device only later to find out, ‘Oh my God. There’s babies and prepubescent children and bestiality?'” Aside from a backlog at the forensic laboratory, Rosenblum had no good........