The U.S. Attorney and the Assistant U.S. Attorneys are not your friends. No matter how nice they seem, when they’re meeting with you or negotiating with your lawyer, they are not on your side. They are on the opposing side, the side of the United States Government.
There are a lot of things that you need to look at when you’re reviewing your plea agreement. That’s why plea review (regardless of the number of plea agreements floated to you) is one of the many services we provide at Federal Prison Tips LLC.
One of the things we’ve seen lately when doing plea reviews (for informational purposes only) for our clients, is something in the “waiver of collateral attack” section.
It is customary with most plea offers to waive your rights to collateral attack. That means you won’t seek an appeal and you won’t launch any “collateral attack” against the government, after sentencing. Lately here though. the government has been including “including 3582” attacks.
3582 is “compassionate release” and while it’s primarily used as a vehicle to get inmates released from prison for extraordinary and compelling circumstances, there is another version of collateral attack. This other version is 3582(C)(2) and this is used for things like when the cocaine to crack ratio changed, or when Former President Barak Obama did a two point downward variance for many offenders in 2015. It was also the vehicle for most “821 Motions” that was the amendments passed by the sentencing commission in 2023.
When you waive right to 3582, you’re waiving your rights to all 3582 remedies, and that’s something you can’t afford.
In regards to the main reason for compassionate release, supposed you got sentenced to 10 years and during that period you developed a terminal cancer. If you waive your right to 3582 in your plea agreement, even if you ended up with stage four terminal cancer, you would not have the right to seek compassionate release.
This was brought on by the onslaught of compassionate release motions during COVID-19, but still goes on today.
When we review plea agreements we find things like this that you may not look for, or that your attorney may not be able to explain in practice. All of our services are offered in an “all in” retainer based package. You can find out more about that here.
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