Lenient White-Collar Sentences

Craig Taffaro was convicted by a jury of several counts of tax evasion and filing false income-tax returns. The PSR calculated an advisory Guidelines imprisonment range of 27 to 33 months. The district court varied downward from the Guidelines and sentenced Taffaro to sixty months’ probation and assessed a fine. The government appealed, arguing the sentence was substantively unreasonable.

The Fifth Circuit affirmed the sentence. The court recognized that it had recently had occasion to “explore the outer bounds of district court discretion in departing downward to award probation to white-collar criminals for whom the guidelines recommend incarceration.” It had concluded in a recent case that a district court abused its discretion in sentencing a man to 60 months’ probation when the guidelines had recommended a range of 168 to 210 months of incarceration. That defendant, however, had been the leader of a sophisticated, multimillion dollar fraud scheme. He also had a prior criminal history. The court said this variance was significantly smaller and that Taffaro had no prior criminal history. Nothing that the government argued convinced the court that the district judge had abused his discretion.

James Ho issued a concurrence, voicing concerns about white-collar sentences:

Nothing is more corrosive to public confidence in our criminal justice system than the perception that there are two different legal standards—one for the powerful, the popular, and the well-connected, and another for everyone else. I fear that the sentence awarded in this case—probation only, no prison time, despite multiple acts of tax evasion and false tax returns across a twelve-year period—will only further rule public cynicism of our institutions of government.