Justice Dept. to Monitor Judges for Sentences Shorter Than Guidelines Suggest The Justice Department told a federal court administrator today that it would begin compiling data on judges who give lighter sentences than federal guidelines prescribe, a move that critics see as an effort to limit judicial independence by creating a "blacklist" of judges. The new policy will require prosecutors to notify Justice Department officials in Washington whenever a federal judge issues a sentence that falls below sentencing guidelines. The notification will set in motion a review of whether an appeal of the judge's sentence should be filed. The policy, first reported on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, is part of a bill signed into law by President Bush in April that seeks to make it tougher for federal judges to depart from sentencing guidelines. The Justice Department, in a letter today to the head of the administrative office of the United States Courts, said it developed the policy as part of the new law's requirements rather than accept a more "onerous" option allowed by Congress. That option would have required the Justice Department to go to Congress with a detailed report each time a judge broke from the sentencing guidelines. In 2001, federal judges handed out sentences below guidelines in 35 percent of the 54,851 cases examined, the United States Sentencing Commission found. But more than half the departures resulted from plea agreements, and prosecutors appealed the sentences in only a tiny fraction of cases, officials said. Mary Beth Buchanan, the United States attorney for the Pittsburgh area and the leader of a Justice Department advisory committee that helped develop the policy, said in an interview that there would probably be some increase in appeals by the Justice Department over sentences as a result of the new policy. But she added: "I don't think it will be a dramatic increase. Unless we get a tremendous increase in our resources, we wouldn't have the capability to do a lot more." Some lawmakers, judges and legal observers, however, said they were deeply troubled by the shift. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, accused Mr. Ashcroft of requiring prosecutors "to participate in the establishment of a blacklist of judges." He called the policy "the latest salvo in the Ashcroft Justice Department's ongoing attack on judicial independence and fairness" in sentencing. John S. Martin, a federal district judge in Manhattan who announced in June that he would retire in part because he saw the judiciary's independence as threatened, said the Justice Department policy was "based on the erroneous premise that a lot of judges around the county are just going off the reservation." He added: "The problem is that a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington looking at the statistics won't know the facts of these cases. They're taking a very mechanistic approach to the whole process." Nicholas M. Gess, a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, said the policy fit a pattern in the Ashcroft Justice Department of centralizing decision-making in Washington, a trend also seen in death penalty cases. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/08/politics/08JUDG.html