 You're watching FJTN, the Federal Judicial Television Network. The Federal Judicial Center and the United States Sentencing Commission present Sentencing and Guidelines, a conversation with Judge Diana Murphy. Now your host, Robin Rolland. Hello, and welcome to a conversation with Judge Diana Murphy. The purpose of today's broadcast is to introduce you not only to Judge Murphy and the workings of the United States Sentencing Commission, but also to all the commissioners. As you know, last November, a full complement of commissioners was appointed to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Since then, they've been consumed in a whirlwind of work, from addressing open issues to working through the amendment cycle without stopping to take a breath. Judge Murphy, the chair of the commission, now stops to take that breath and reflect on the current and future work of the commission with Judge Fern Smith, the director of the Federal Judicial Center. In addition to their conversation, we have highlights from the May 2009th annual National Seminar on Federal Sentencing Guidelines, co-sponsored by the Commission and the Federal Bar Association. During that seminar, all nine commissioners appeared on a panel entitled Meet the Commission, moderated by James Spellman, who represented the Federal Bar Association. The commissioners commented on a variety of federal sentencing and sentencing guideline topics. For example, one issue that continues to arise is the crack versus powder cocaine debate. At the seminar, Judge Johnson updated the audience of mostly probation officers and attorneys on this issue. And in 1994, Congress directed the sentencing commission to conduct a study and to make recommendations. And in 1994, the commission said that the 101 ratio was really unjustified. And they voted in a very, very controversial decision by a 4-3 margin that the penalty should be equal. It went to Congress, as all of the commission's recommendations do, and Congress rejected it. Now, as I said before, even the three who voted against making it equal did say that 101 really is unjustified. So Congress sent it back. And in April 1997, the sentencing commission said that we will change the triggering amounts for powder cocaine from 500 grams to anywhere between 125 grams to 375 grams. So they would lower that. And they would change the 5-gram triggering mandatory minimum from crack cocaine from anywhere between 25 and 75 grams. That was sent to the Congress in April of 1997, and it sits there to this day. In addition to updates like Judge Johnson's, commissioners also informed the participants of issues which the commission might consider in future amendment cycles. Judge Kendall commented on whether alternatives to incarceration should be expanded under the guidelines. And I think sometimes people miss that. In that, it is viewed that the only real punishment is incarceration. Well, that's not necessarily the case. Probation is punishment. Home confinement certainly is punishment. Confinement in a community-based facility is punishment. All of those still can, all of those different alternatives. And again, let me just say I'm speaking for myself here. I've talked to some of the other commissioners and we've had some discussions about this. So I'm not purporting to speak for us as a group. But I fully expect that this commission will take a look at those issues. Issues of alternatives is set forth in the neighboring legislation. You'll get a chance to meet all of the commissioners as we periodically return to the panel discussion throughout the broadcast. And now let's turn to Judge Murphy and Judge Smith. Judge Diana Murphy was appointed chair of the United States Sentencing Commission along with the rest of the commissioners in November 1999. Judge Murphy currently serves on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals where she's been since 1994. She was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota in 1980 and served as its chief judge from 1992 to 1994. Judge Murphy also served as a state district court judge from 1976 to 1980. Talking with Judge Murphy is Judge Fern Smith, the director of the Federal Judicial Center. Judge Smith became the center's director in 1999. She's been a judge for the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California since her appointment in 1988. Similar to that, Judge Smith was also a state judge from 1986 to 1988. They spoke earlier this summer here in our studio. Judge Murphy, good morning. Good morning, Judge Smith. It's a real pleasure to have this opportunity to converse with you about the Sentencing Commission. Let's start with your role as the chair. What have you been able to accomplish since the commission finally got up to full strength and was able to start working again? Well I take that really as a question about what the commission has accomplished. And we've had a whirlwind of activity because, as you know, we started in the middle of November and the annual cycle ends on May 1. That's the deadline to get amendments and guidelines to Congress. And in that period of time, we promulgated guidelines in a number of areas, the No Electronic Theft Act, sexual predators, some firearms offenses, identity theft, methamphetamine sentences, and telephone cloning. And those were responding to legislative directives or new legislation. We also resolved a number of circuit conflicts in interpretation of the guidelines. And there are always some technical amendments to do. But just getting the place organized and running, of course, was particularly a responsibility of the chair. So we feel pretty good about what we've been able to do in this cycle. I would think so. Have there been any surprises? Well, yes. Yes, I've had several surprises. I would say two very pleasant ones and one not so pleasant. I really didn't know the other commissioners. There were two that I had met. So I wasn't really sure what kind of group we would have. Obviously, they were very qualified. But we're really working together very well. They're very knowledgeable about the guidelines. They're smart. They're hardworking. They're always very prepared. And perhaps most important of all, they have the quality of being able to listen to each other and to members of the public or interested groups. And that's enabled us to get this much done. So that would be a very pleasant surprise. It wasn't that I was expecting the other, but you never know. And the next thing that I guess I'd mention is that it's been a surprise how well what we've done has been received. And the reason I say that is because there are so many different groups that are affected by the guidelines. And you might expect naturally that prosecutors and public defenders, probation officers, members of industry groups, Congress, all have some different perspective in the Department of Justice, of course. And to be getting the positive feedback that we have from such a variety of groups who seem to understand the complexity of how we have to meet so many different concerns, that's been a very gratifying surprise. The unpleasant surprise was to discover that while there were no commissioners, there weren't any at all for 13 months. And for a time period before that, extending back really a couple of years, there were vacancies that came on the commission that weren't able to be filled because the appointing forces weren't able to agree. And the budget was cut way back because of that, because the view on the Hill was, well, if there aren't commissioners, you don't need as much of a budget. And it wasn't unreasonable in some respects. But now we're all there, and we have a greatly reduced staff. And so we've been working really hard on bringing that up to what it was before. Well, I'm sure that's a lot of work. I heard that in late May, you and your fellow commissioners met for a few days on a goal-setting retreat. Tell me about that. What kinds of things did you discuss, and what kind of results were you hoping for? Well, that was the first time that we ever were able to sort of relax because of the fact that we had this very short cycle to do our work for this year. And so here was an opportunity for us to sit back, reflect on how we felt about what we had done during the year, substantively, but also how we had done it if we were happy with that. And I think that took less time than I thought it might when we were setting up the retreat and the agenda for it because pretty much people were contempt on both scores. Then we also, we had learned something about the history of past commissions during our confirmation process and preparation for it. And we want to learn from the strengths and problems also that occurred in the past. And so we took a little time reflecting on what we could about the history and to build on what has really worked well and also to look out for some of the pitfalls that popped up. And then finally and very importantly, we wanted to think about what we wanted to do in the short term future and in the long term where the terms are staggered. So we have different terms, but we're all going to be there for a limited finite period of time. And we want to do as much as we can to make these guidelines effective, workable, to be able to advise Congress on sentencing policy. And so we worked out an agenda for this coming year, a tentative agenda. We published it already in the Federal Register. We'll be getting feedback and we might alter it somewhat depending upon the feedback. But we also talked about our longer range, some longer range plans. Are there any of those future plans that you would like to discuss with us today? Well, yes, I, just for this year, of course, we have published the notices that indicated and we're hoping to work on economic crimes. The Commission in the past has had some unfinished work in theft, fraud, tax, money laundering where there have been some problems. We're going to have an economic crime symposium. And what we have conceived of, and Commissioner O'Neill is assisting me in co-chairing an effort to put together a third symposium for the Commission this fall, focusing on economic crimes. We've scheduled it for, I think it's October 12 and 13. It's the Thursday and Friday of the week following Columbus Day. And it will be held at George Mason University Law School in Arlington, Virginia. We're thinking of an invited audience of about 175 to 200 persons. And that audience will be multifaceted, consisting of the Federal Legal Community Representatives, Judges, Probation Officers, Attorneys, also some representatives of academia and perhaps of the business community. And our focus, while it's called an economic crime symposium, we're thinking of within that broader umbrella of including a focus on a number of issues. As many of you have heard from what has been said about the amendments recently submitted to Congress, a number of them are related to new ways of committing old crimes and in some cases new crimes, but all involving some aspect of technological development. No doubt there's going to be continuing interest in this area by Congress and others. There's a great deal that we need to learn and we have some information that we can share. And so we hope to spend part of our symposium conference focusing on those particular issues. The Department of Justice is going to be interested in working with us on some of these areas that have been tough in the past and trying to make them all work together. And right now there are 38 circuit conflicts that we've identified and the Supreme Court gave us the task of dealing with the circuit conflicts and we're in the process of developing some standards that we could use to decide which one should we do. The criminal law committee gives us some input on that of the criminal law committee of the judicial conference, but they've said they have 18 priorities. Well that's still quite a large group, so we're working on these standards. Those were some of the things that we'd be doing this year. We also have to some unfinished work in the sexual predators and firearms. I'd be very interested in knowing how the commission with all of these issues, this huge number of issues, how do you go about deciding which issues you're going to tackle and which specific guidelines you think need amending? Well we have the benefit of a lot of input. One of the ex-officio commissioners is the Attorney General or her delegate and we have a very able law professor on leave at the Department of Justice, Third Kirk Patrick. I think the department does strongly support the institutional role of the commission. It would be very easy for the department when it's passing a crime bill to simply have as part of the bill a direction from Congress. You will jump the sentence and guideline seven levels for this particular enhancement and five levels for that, but it would totally undermine the role of the commission if all they were doing is responding to directives to increase something seven levels. That would not allow the commission a chance to deliberate and to calibrate the punishment. So we're willing to take our arguments to the commission and let them perform their deliberative role of establishing proportionality in the sentencing system. So we support that role strongly. So we have a way that we get the views of the Department of Justice. We have some advisory groups of criminal defense lawyers, probation officers, federal defenders, industry groups, let us know what they're concerned about. They also let people on the Hill know. And we hear from the Hill about things that Congress is interested in us doing. Right on the commission, of course, we've got quite a bit of expertise. Five of us have sentenced people with the guidelines. John has been with the commission since 1989. He was general counsel for many years. And the seventh commissioner had significant experience on the Hill working with the guideline process. And it's now a professor of criminal law and does some criminal defense work. So just within our own group, we have some ideas. The criminal law committee of the conference suggests what they're interested in. And they speak on behalf of the federal judicial branch. The staff comes up with ideas, too. We have a very talented staff. So there's really no shortage of ideas. It's just setting the priorities that realistically can be dealt with. I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise to you, but the federal sentencing guidelines are not universally popular. And they have been criticized in the past over certain sentencing guidelines, especially where some drug offenses are involved and more particularly where mandatory minimum sentences are involved. Are these issues that the commission intends to address in the near future? Well, as you know, Congress has had quite a bit of interest in mandatory minimums. The commission's position always has been is that they are inconsistent with the guideline system set up by the Sentencing Reform Act. And we're hoping that to the extent we're able to give prompt and appropriate attention to congressional concerns that no further use will be made of mandatory minimums. There seems to be now some new interest on the Hill in revisiting the topic to see how well mandatory minimums have worked. We appeared just about two weeks ago at a House subcommittee hearing on mandatory minimums and went back over the studies that the commission has done in the past and the commission's reasoning about the limitations of mandatory minimums. And the committee seemed very interested in our viewpoint. We also understand that the criminal law committee would like us to update the report that was done about nine years ago on mandatory minimums by the commission and to the extent we're able to build up our budget because we need that for the staff to do all of these things. That's something that we may well undertake. That's kind of an interesting relationship between the commission and Congress. And it's one that has caused certain conflicts to arise. The commission is responsible for the sentencing guidelines and Congress enacts the mandatory minimums, which is something, as you mentioned, that the commission has often opposed. Do these occasional conflicts with Congress interfere with your ability to follow your original mandate in being the expert sentencing body of the system? Well, you know, we start out behind the eight ball a little bit on this because of the fact that there wasn't a commission for quite a bit of time, things built up. There was some frustration on the hill. And we recognize that Congress is supreme in this area. The commission is a creature of the Congress. We operate on the basis of delegated authority by Congress. The decisions that we make, even the decisions that we make in which we feel we're absolutely correct in, are still ultimately subject to Congressional review. And that's as it should be because they stand for election. We certainly don't. They're ultimately subject to the people in a way in which we, particularly five of us who sit in the commission, do not. So it's entirely appropriate, I think, for Congress to play the role that it does. But a very high-placed person in the Senate just said to me a couple of weeks ago that if we continue to be able to present things to Congress with a seven to zero vote, that Congress is going to respect our expertise. And I want to assure anybody who's listening to this that our seven to zero vote was not a rubber stamp at all. On some of the areas that we worked in, we had wide differences among the commissioners. And we worked through various options, trying to deal with all the different interests and problems that the particular guideline area involved. And so it was only by a lot of hard work and listening to each other and attending to all the different viewpoints that we were able to come up with these. But it does make a difference, Congress is telling us. And we've also seen that when we go over, because we've made a lot of calls on the Hill, when we go over, we have a great amount of data about the way sentencing has worked. And they're very interested when we are able to pull it together and show it to them in a way that they don't have much time to be looking at these things if we can come up with something that they can look at quickly and see the trend or what the problems are, that's very effective. And that's another reason that we're working on our budget because we need more research help and so on that we can, and to the extent that we can make some studies like one thing we may be able to expand the safety valve. There's, I met with the Attorney General Janet Reno recently and I've talked with the head of the Bureau of Prisons, Kathleen Hawks-Sawyer, about this. And the Attorney General said, well, you know, if you could do a study on recidivism rates for the people who have already been sentenced under the safety valve. And the idea people have that are experienced is that the recidivism is low. So, and if that's correct, these people didn't need huge long sentences to deter them. And so, that's just one of the areas that we'd be able to work on. Well, that's encouraging and interesting to hear examples of all three branches of the government working together in areas of common interest. Let's go back to you if we may. You have an interesting perspective in that you have been a district judge both before and after the sentencing guidelines came into effect. You are now a Court of Appeals judge and you are also the chair of the Sentencing Commission, three very different and unique positions. What is your perspective from all of these different experiences that you've had about the federal sentencing guidelines? Well, you know, having been a judge at the time they came in, I think it's fair to say most of us were at the very least somewhat skeptical of them. But, you know, they provide an objective standard by which a judge can sentence in a way that you build up some confidence level in being able to use those. And I think I also learned as a district judge that you have a lot of fact finding power that you can use to enable you to get the right sentence for an individual person. Let's face it, the district judges are the ones who are really using these guidelines, applying them to human beings in all kinds of situations. And I think this Supreme Court's decision in the United States versus Coon has helped allow the flexibility that judges needed. And I think that influenced the courts of appeal and I think just seeing it from the appellate perspective, you don't know all the details about the case, the way the district judge does. However, you need to make sure that the guidelines are being applied consistently in your circuit and consistent with the guidelines themselves and you would be concerned if there were disparities and so on. Then you get to being here where they're actually made and that's such a different process than judges go through with the kind of interaction you have with the public and with industry groups and where you have to publish every intent that you have and then another time and another time and you see how difficult it is because it's easy to think, well, what we want is flexibility but at the same time serious crimes deserve serious sentences. To go back to the Sentencing Reform Act and you don't want the disparity and these are working in particular things like some of the things we did this year. You could start out and have a general guideline because I came thinking, well, let's simplify the guidelines. It's not as easy as I thought it was going to be because if Congress has placed a number of different problems in one statute like the no electronic theft act, if you had one guideline for it all, it would work very unfairly and you have to use different principles because if you just have one catch all thing and then an upward or downward departure, you're going to get very wide disparities. So balancing is very fine tuned. I know that you're traveling all around the country all the time visiting circuit conferences and workshops and what do you hear the current view of judges about the guidelines? Do you just see that split between the new ones and the past or is there something that? It's not completely split. You know, there are new judges who come in having heard about the Sentencing Guidelines who may have been state court judges or magistrate judges or simply practicing attorneys in the criminal law field who have opinions. You know, in my new role now as director of the Federal Judicial Center, I see judges coming from every circuit, new judges and more experienced judges and it's interesting from my perspective as a district judge to look at it because when I first came on the district, went on the district court, the guidelines were new and quite controversial, but 12 years have passed since then and so now out of the 599 district judges serving, 75% of them came on the bench after the guidelines were in place and of the 159 circuit judges now serving, two-thirds of them came on the bench after. This makes me feel old. I know the feeling. So a lot has happened since November of 1987 and for the vast majority of judges now sitting, the guidelines are really all they know when it comes to federal sentencing and so there's I think a different approach to them and so we find in our new judges orientation program the judges are very aware of the fact that they need to understand the sentencing laws including the guidelines and that's one reason we have the commission, members of the commission staff attend all of our orientation programs and seminars for district judges to introduce them to these laws and we want to be sure we keep working with the commission so that the information we're passing on to these new judges is correct and up to date. The experienced judges on the other hand don't articulate the same need or desire frankly for more education but I think in general the major disagreement with judges about sentencing really doesn't have to do with the guidelines anymore. It really has to do with the mandatory minimums and the sense that I get from listening to judges around the country is that what judges would really like would be for Congress to stop enacting mandatory minimum laws and to reduce or reverse the ones that are now on the books but you know there are different judges with different points of view and some find something anomalous or in need of sentencing or changing that another judge is comfortable with and you know I think that the commission's continuing outreach to judges will help discuss these and address these issues for judges as they go along and you and I have had enough discussions about this off the record for me to know that both of us agree that the sentencing process has dramatically changed since the advent of the guidelines and you know whether one agrees with the sentencing guidelines or not for all district judges it's made a huge difference in the process of sentencing in simply the procedures that we have to go through and the way we have to address various issues but it's also made a big impact on probation officers. What do you hear and view as the way the role of the probation officers has changed due to the guidelines? Well it's quite dramatic I think when I went on the bench one of the things I noticed was you get quite a difference in approach between individual probation officers because there wasn't this kind of objective standard that they all were applying or the objective tests and most importantly the probation officer made a recommendation recommendation to the judge that was private to the judge and I had come from a state court system where they knew in fact it was given orally and the lawyers are right there and they could argue with the judge about it and I was very surprising to me then to go to the federal system and learn that that very key thing that every prosecutor defense lawyer would like to know was secret and only given to the judge and that's one of the things about the guideline system that isn't mentioned as much as I think it should be because it was a very salutary thing of having a system that all the probation officers are using applying in the same way and then the whatever the recommendation is or the calculus that they're doing under the guidelines whether they think there should be an upward departure it's right in that report the parties all have access to it they can there's system set up so they can respond and and the court then may have to have a hearing depending upon what the nature of the of the issue is but the probation officer is another aspect about how important they are is that I think a lot of us just had a tremendous feeling of unease this these things look so complicated I mean how were we gonna find the time to master the system and start applying it now after you work with it for a while it isn't as mysterious as it seemed at first but the probation officers as you know from your own experience for they're the ones that are on the front line they are the ones that are you know going forward to bringing in all the different offense characters it's a base events level and so on and everybody else is reacting from then on sure so they're they're really critical well they are they are and it's nice to have them acknowledged in their role in the process acknowledged your role is to determine the facts as they exist and I know that it's difficult and I know that oftentimes you're not going to be given the full report from the prosecution and the defense in regard to the facts but I think that ultimately is your responsibility it is not your responsibility necessarily to reflect the facts that have been argued to you by counsel your function should be the same as it was prior to 1987 to the extent that you should accurately reflect what the nature of the facts are though it may be unpopular though it may mean rejection of plea agreements because I think ultimately that's the responsibility of the judge to take your facts and then determine whether plea agreements are acceptable so I think that in some ways your role has been consistent over the years in some ways obviously different by way of interpretation of the guidelines getting back to judges district judges for a minute the way they view the guidelines the sense I have is that it's not the concept of guidelines that's objected to as much as the lack of discretion that judges are used to and treasure and and feel as a terribly integral part of their own role is there a way of giving the judges more discretion and yet preserving this concept of reducing unwarranted disparity in sentencing which I think everybody agrees is a worthy goal well you've used one of the magic buzzwords in that because the statute does talk about unwarranted disparity and of course that was one of the major things behind the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act was the data showed that there was a huge difference and it appeared unwarranted disparity but no situation is completely identical to the other as you know and so by using these objective standards in the guidelines you can apply it to the given situation and if it's appropriate the judge can depart either upward or downward and that's an integral part of the guidelines sometimes people think that departures are sort of forbidden by the guideline system and they aren't that's a it's an integral feature of it I don't think anyone in the commission here feels just automatically that departures are bad departures are part of the human system of sentencing people and every human being is different every situation is different and when you try and create uniform guidelines that apply throughout the country from Madison Wisconsin to a small town in Mississippi it's very difficult to think that departures are something to be frowned upon I think on the part of the commission we will study departure rates to determine if any type of fundamental problems exist if we see something unusual that might indicate that there is a systematic problem with the guidelines and that there might be a need to visit some area but barring that you should know that departures even nationwide are not unusual one of the history conflicts that we address this year was aberrant behavior and and we worked there to try to give judges nationally more opportunity to depart but inappropriate circumstances so we had to set out the area where that where they would have the discretion to depart and in some of the other things we did this year too you you have to be working at both of these together but all in all I think the more judges work with the guidelines the more they learn how they can apply it in a way that they find just is there a way for judges or others outside of the commission to assist and contribute to the work of the commission well yes we're very interested in in in judges viewpoints and we do publish everything in the federal register we're required to do that by law as I told you but judges aren't in the common practice of reading the federal register and one of the judges a friend of mine Judge Avere and Cohn had brought it to our attention that you know this was he was upset about one of these circuit conflicts that he hadn't heard he hadn't gotten because he wasn't reading the federal register and we are exploring we do have a website that we post everything on ourselves and we're going to we're exploring the possibility of of being able to put all of our notices on the on the jnet and and we want to communicate with all the judges to let them know about this but then we've got a hotline people can call when they have particular problems we have an area that people can call and we have publications or written responses that may assist in some things we also are very much into wanting to go out and visit you know it's it's unless we know what the problems people have working with the guidelines we can't possibly change it our our goal in knowing the problems is not to say bad judge you're not supposed to be doing that but rather maybe this is something we can bring to congress's attention and we can I mean the border problems yes is what I particularly have in mind and I'm thinking about that but we're going out to circuit conferences maybe not on quite as dramatic a level as you and workshops and we just met with all the judges in Boston when we were up there for a criminal law committee and they were they were wonderful they were so frank and and they they volunteered to be in any kind of pilot project we would like they had quite a variety of viewpoints and we want to do more of that good well I'm glad to hear and and I hope that people viewing this will understand that they don't have to wait though for you to go to them that there are websites and other ways of communicating ideas and seeking information from you about about your projects do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to share with us well you know you you asked about our our future my term as chair is under the statute is six years designed to keep this out of politics since it's longer than an elective cycle and you know that time goes by quickly I've told you some of the things that we want to do in not in 2002 it's going to be the 15th year anniversary of the guidelines and we are looking to doing a report that we would have come out that year looking at just how they're working and evaluation and we think that could be useful I've mentioned some of these studies that we want to do so that we can look for more ways we can get away from some of these mandatory minimum you know tight boxes the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has done a study on Native American problems and one part of it is related to criminal law and they have asked the commission to study the impact of the guidelines on Native Americans and in the course of this term working on the sexual predators we discovered that some of the possibilities we were looking at for enhancements would work particularly severely on Native Americans because some reservations have all of the what would normally be state crimes prosecuted by the federal government so instead of getting the standard in South Dakota for assault for example you all of a sudden have the federal guidelines coming in which have a much more severe impact and so we want to do some research there and see if we can there are a lot of areas that we want to work on and we hope everybody will be understanding that we can't do it overnight have some patience with us and we hope we get our budget so we can do all this I hope that for you too and for us as well and I think what you've accomplished so far and what you have planned in the works is very interesting and impressive and I'll look forward to watching for it let me comment too on how pleased I am at the collaborative efforts of our two agencies um you know Diana you and I've been friends for a long time I met you right after I went on the bench and so it's really special for me both personally and and professionally to be able to work with you I feel that way too in this way and I wanted to mention in particular our sentencing policy institute which of course is a collaborative effort and in which the FJC takes the lead but is certainly joined in uh in consultation with the judicial conferences criminal law committee and the sentencing commission and the bureau of prisons and the administrative office of the courts and it's a way of bringing together judges and probation officers and prosecutors and defense lawyers from all over the country to exchange perspectives and discuss different points of view on these important sentencing issues and I think the results of of this institute gives a lot of assistance both to the sentencing commission I hope into the criminal law committee and I guess we're now in our final planning phase for the next institute which is going to be in Phoenix Arizona in September the 10th to the 13th and then of course we have our broadcasts like this one which has been a great deal of fun and uh but we've also done some others we did one earlier this year on restitution and one on departures and I guess we have another one planned together uh for to be aired in November of this year November 16th I think and it's all part of a continuing series and process to help judges and keep them informed and probation officers and others interested in these developments so I look forward to more conversations with you personally off the record and on the record and in the meantime I thank you very much for joining us today for our pleasure we hope you found this conversation informative if you'd like more information about the new commissioners and their initiatives check out the sentencing commission's website at www.ussc.gov and if you have questions about guideline application you can always call the sentencing commission's helpline at 202-502-4545 if you have any comments or suggestions for future FJTN programs be sure to fill out and return the program evaluations completing the rosters will also help us plan future broadcasts both forms can be found on the FJC's DCN site jnet.fjc.dcn as Judge Smith noted our next joint FJTN production will air live on November 16 and will focus on relevant conduct look for details in the next FJTN bulletin we'll leave you now with some final comments from ex-officio commissioner Michael Gaines at the guideline seminar thank you for watching from where I sit as an ex-officio member of the sentencing commission I have an opportunity to observe and what I observe with this group of folks up here is an exceptionally well qualified commission I'm not necessarily an expert to comment on that and I would certainly not say anything to disparage the former commissions but I think the Murphy commission is going to be one that you will be quite pleased with you've heard them this morning they're very bright folks they know what they're doing they know the guidelines they use the guidelines and I think as you've heard from some of their comments they're truly interested in those of you who use the guidelines one of the things that I've been most impressed with is they're reaching out for input to the public through public meetings public hearings that the commission has held through the criminal law committee through the practitioners advisory group probation officers group they have truly reached out for input and I think that's very important