"W violates constitutional authority": Libbey's judge, Judge Walton

clipped from www.latimes.com In his first public comments on the matter, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton took issue with Bush's statement that the prison sentence ordered for Libby last month was "excessive." Walton defended the sentence, saying that he followed established legal precedents as well as a strict interpretation of federal sentencing guidelines that has been supported by Bush's own administration He also questioned whether Bush had the constitutional power to order the supervised release without sending Libby to jail. The form of probation, according to the law, is supposed to be reserved for persons after they have served time. "The president has effectively rewritten the statutory scheme on an ad hoc basis to make the punishment created by Congress applicable to a situation that Congress clearly did not intend," Walton wrote it is fair to say that the court is somewhat perplexed as to how its sentence could accurately be characterized as 'excessive,' " Walton wrote

In his order, Walton cited several legal precedents supporting his sentencing ruling, including a decision in June by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case known as Rita vs. United States. The high court ruled in that case that a sentence that did not depart from the sentencing guidelines was inherently reasonable.