Attorney General Sessions Orders Prosecutors to Pursue ‘Most Serious’ Charges Against Defendants

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions has directed U.S. Attorneys to pursue the harshest possible charges against all criminal defendants, a move that’s guaranteed to vastly increase the U.S. prison population. As it is, the United States has more people in prison than any other nation, both in total number and per capita, and by large margins. The Attorney General now wants to increase those numbers.

“It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” Sessions wrote in a memorandum dated Wednesday to U.S. Attorneys. “This policy affirms our responsibility to enforce the law, is moral and just, and produces consistency.”

Any attempts to seek less than the maximum charge or sentence “require supervisory approval, and the reasoning must be documented in the file,” the Sessions memo states.

It’s believed Sessions is seeking to use this new directive as a tool to in the Trump administration’s war on drugs, a throwback to failed decades of U.S. policy that has not only not worked but destroyed the lives of millions of Americans.

Before the memo was published, The New York Times on Tuesday reported “Sessions’s directives to United States attorneys would replace guidance issued by [former Attorney General Eric] Holder in 2010, when he told prosecutors not to feel compelled to seek the most serious viable charges in every case.”

“Equal justice depends on individualized justice,” Mr. Holder wrote, wiping clean [former Attorney General John] Ashcroft’s 2003 orders to pursue “the most serious, readily provable offense in all federal prosecutions” and emphasize consistency in drug cases.

Vox reports that in 2015, “Trump outright told MSNBC that he’s ‘tough on crime.’ He praised Vice President Mike Pence for increasing mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes as governor of Indiana. He falsely claimed that the murder rate is at a 45-year high when it’s actually near a historical low. And he said police should be more aggressive than they are today, particularly by using the controversial ‘stop and frisk’ strategy that a court struck down in New York City because it was used to target minority Americans.”

Sessions, a former federal prosecutor, has similarly taken a hardline view on crime and drugs. In his last year in the Senate, he was key in killing a criminal justice reform bill that would have relaxed prison sentences for low-level drug offenders. He criticized police reforms led by the Obama administration during a November 2015 Senate hearing called “The War on Police.” And he said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana” while advocating against pot legalization.

Bottom line: The Trump campaign’s rally line of “lock her up!” is now the Trump administration’s policy of “lock them up.”

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Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr and a CC license