The new law is not even remotely “soft on crime.”
These changes are not driven by any kind of philosophy about decarceration; they are driven by data. Judges have immense discretion in sentencing and rarely if ever impose maximum statutory penalties. To see which sentences judges are actually imposing, the commission looked at average sentences in other jurisdictions, and acquired data from the D.C. Superior Court covering every adult case from 2010 to 2019. It crunched the numbers to identify what sentences D.C.
You might ask, then: Why bother to change these sentences in the first place? In addition to the problems with vague and unconstitutional provisions, the new code puts crimes and punishments in a more logical order. Stealing a car should not have the same penalty as taking a human life. And that’s just one of many baffling examples. For instance, the existing code imposes a higher penalty for threatening to destroy someone’s property than for actually destroying it.
—that the four-year max applies to “someone who commits a violent crime, a felony, even with a handgun.” But that is flatly false.What’s so frustrating about the spigot of misinformation about the new law is that the RCCA is not, and has never been, designed to reduce incarceration in D.C. The District has one of the
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