Follow up to previous posting sentencing guidelines, “U.S. Sentencing Commission has published the results of the first-ever survey of federal trial judges to elicit their views about federal sentencing under the advisory guidelines system in effect since 2005. The survey, among many other findings, indicates that 62 percent of the responding judges believe that mandatory minimum sentences for various federal crimes are too high. The survey, conducted from January through March 2010, drew responses from 639 of the 942 judges to whom it was sent, a 67.8 percent response rate. Based on an analysis, the 639 judges who responded sentenced 116,183 of the 146,511 individual federal criminal offenders sentenced in fiscal years 2008 and 2009 – 79 percent of the offenders sentenced in that two-year span.”