Narrating Context and Rehabilitating Rehabilitation: Federal Sentencing Work in Yale Law School's Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic

Abstract

The Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic (CMIC) at Yale Law School has been representing clients in federal sentencing and state postconviction cases since 2016. Drawing on a blueprint I set forth in a 2013 article, the clinic teaches a model of noncapital sentencing practice that builds on the best capital defense sentencing practices and seeks to transform judges' and prosecutors' assumptions about criminal sentencing.

In this article, I set forth CMIC's theoretical underpinnings and detail our interdisciplinary, trauma-informed approach to sentencing advocacy and clinical practice. I then describe CMIC's case outcomes, including variances which have reduced each of our clients' prison time an average of five years below the United States Sentencing Guidelines range and more than 18 months below prosecutors' recommended sentences. CMIC's work has also produced innovations to traditional client-centered, holistic lawyering; enhanced approaches to working with experts; and yielded insights into the incorporation of defense-based victim outreach in appropriate cases.

Our experiences in CMIC raise several areas for future research, including whether the model will produce the kind of fundamental sentencing reform I predicted in my earlier work, and questions about fairness, risks, data, and scalability. I am publishing this article with the hope and intention that other law school clinics will borrow from and improve on CMIC's model.