Marvin E. Frankel
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Marvin E. Frankel (July 26, 1920 - March 5, 2002) was a litigator, judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, professor at Columbia Law School, and legal scholar whose views helped to establish sentencing guidelines for the federal courts.
[edit] Biography
Frankel received his B.A. from Queens College in 1943, and his LL.B. from Columbia Law School in 1948. He also served as the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review.
Over a career of more than 50 years, Frankel traveled widely campaigning for human rights and as an advocate before the Supreme Court. He helped draft the brief for The New York Times in the First Amendment case, New York Times v. Sullivan, which set limits on libel suits brought by public figures. He was a founder of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now renamed Human Rights First) and served as its chairman for many years.
Frankel's short book, Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order (1973) was a principal influence on the sentencing reform movement that had a significant influence on American sentencing law in the late 20th century. Drawing on his experiences as a federal judge, Frankel argued that unrestrained sentencing discretion on the part of individual judges, a legacy of progressive penal policy that emphasized the rehabilitation of individual offenders and tailored sentences more to the character of the offender than the seriousness of the offense, resulted in arbitrary sentences and wide disparity between the sentences imposed on similar defendants for similar crimes. His graceful writing style, memorable anecdotes, and palpable sense of outrage made the book accessible to a wide policy-making public, and pushed his proposal for sentencing commissions empowered to create binding sentencing guidelines to restrain judicial discretion to the forefront of the criminal reform agenda of the 1970s and 1980s. Sentencing commissions and guidlelines were created in a number of states, and most controversially in the federal Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. The federal sentencing guidelines were widely criticized as an unnecessarily rigid and extreme version of Frankel's idea. In 2005, in the case of United States v. Booker, the United States Supreme Court declared the Sentencing Reform Act unconstitutional insofar as it made the guidelines mandatory. The guidelines remain influential in federal sentencing, however, and Frankel's ideas continue to influence sentencing reform in the United States and in other countries.
Frankel worked at the law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP from 1983 until his death in 2002.
[edit] Selected publications
- The Grand Jury: An Institution on Trial
- Sentencing: Helping Judges Do Their Jobs
- The Search for Truth: An Umpireal View, 123 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1031 (1975)
- Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order
