Ep.37 – Human Rights Watch Report on The Trial Penalty in Federal Drug Cases -- Last month, Human Rights Watch released an important new report – An Offer You Can’t Refuse: How US Federal Prosecutors Force Drug Defendants to Plead Guilty. In the report, Human Rights Watch research reveals, among other things, that (based on raw federal sentencing data for 2012) the average sentence for those who pled guilty to a federal drug offense was five years, four months, while for those convicted after trial the average sentence was 16 years. In this episode of NACDL’s The Criminal Docket, we sat down with the report’s author Jamie Fellner, Senior Advisor with the US Program at Human Rights Watch. Learn more about NACDL. Ivan J. Dominguez, host; Isaac Kramer and Elsa-Maria Ohman, production assistants; Steven Logan, production supervisor. Music West Bank (Lezet) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 and Walkabout (Digital Primitives) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
