Opinion: U.S. sentencing needs reform, but Manafort’s 47 months was a strange one
Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chairman, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington in 2017. By Nancy Gertner March 9 at 12:55 PM Nancy Gertner, a retired U.S. District Court judge in Massachusetts, is a lecturer at Harvard Law School.
That Ellis would go lower than the guideline range was clear; the question was how much. Manafort’s age mattered. The same amount of time has a different resonance for 69-year-old than for a younger man. In fact, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not suggest a specific sentence. He did only what was required — compute the guideline score, based on the offenses — and left the ultimate decision up to the judge.
To the extent that the Manafort case was different from run-of-the-mill white-collar cases, those differences were not mitigating. This was not a crime of necessity, to save a dying business, or of hardship, to deal with an ill relative or some other emergency. This was about greed. It was not a momentary lapse of judgment; it took place over an extended period.
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