Lisa Benson cartoon

In the ongoing challenge to impartial justice and the rule of law that is the Roger Stone case, there was a victory for the constitutional system Thursday, in the form of U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s sentencing of Stone to three years and four months in prison.

We say this not because the punishment necessarily fits the crime, or, rather, crimes: Last November, a federal jury convicted Stone, a longtime crony and political counselor to President Trump, on seven counts of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness. Reasonable people can disagree about whether Judge Jackson’s sentence is appropriate. Stone’s is a first conviction for nonviolent crimes; but his wrongdoing consequentially obstructed a crucial House investigation of the Trump campaign’s efforts to learn about Democratic Party computer files hacked by Russia and made public by WikiLeaks. Given the seriousness of those charges, career prosecutors at the Justice Department initially wanted him to spend up to nine years behind bars.

That recommendation was overturned by Attorney General William Barr under murky circumstances, including a tweet from President Donald Trump that seemed to demand Stone get leniency to avoid a “miscarriage of justice!” Three of the department’s attorneys quit the case, and a fourth quit altogether, in protest, while Barr, as he denied that Trump’s tweets influenced his decision, was reduced to pleading publicly with Mr. Trump to let him do his job independently.

What’s beyond reasonable debate, however, is that this entire situation was avoidable and created at least the appearance of undue presidential meddling in what are supposed to be autonomous Justice Department deliberations — highly politically sensitive ones affecting the president’s friend at that.

Also, it put Judge Jackson in a difficult position. She handled it well, leavening her moderate sentence for Stone with remarks obviously directed at Trump. “This case also exemplifies why it is that this system, for good reason, demands that the responsibility (for sentencing) falls on someone neutral,” she said. “Someone whose job may involve issuing opinions in favor of and against the same administration in the same week. Not someone who has a long-standing friendship with the defendant. Not someone whose political career was aided by the defendant. And surely not someone whose personal involvement underlined the case.”

“The court cannot be influenced by those comments,” she went on. “They were entirely inappropriate. But I will not hold them against the defendant, either.”

In short, the rule of law, American-style, is composed of many ingredients, among which are autonomy and procedural fairness inside the Justice Department, but another of which — as an ultimate check — is judicial independence, which Judge Jackson epitomized. Her conduct was especially restorative of public trust in view of Trump’s attempt to bludgeon her verbally on Twitter, and his even cruder attacks on the foreperson of the Stone jury, which the judge also pointedly praised. Trump may yet pardon Stone to get his way, but disavowed that, for now, on Thursday.

Ideally, presidential discretion, restraint and respect would make it less necessary for any judge to push back. Right now, however, those are the very ingredients that the rule of law most palpably lacks.

— The Washington Post