Very quickly, in August 2003, then Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memorandum to federal prosecutors, essentially instructing them not to plead cases down. The official position at the federal level of the Department of Justice is that there is not supposed to be any of this kind of bargaining down—charge bargaining, basically—for the purposes of getting a plea. In reality, in actual operation, that oversight is very difficult to maintain, but it shows a disconnect and it shows how it becomes a kind of high-stakes poker game in terms of what somebody is going to get. It's particularly disturbing in light of the fact that, in the last twenty years, developments in court sentencing in the United States were supposed to have been following a rational approach, with predictability being built in as much as possible. That's what sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums were supposed to be bringing about. In reality, though, we see that this is how it functions.
On December 6th, 2006. See this statement in context.