ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: For more on today’s Supreme Court hearing, we’re joined by Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the "American Lawyer" and "Legal Times," and a regular on the NewsHour. Welcome, Stuart. What was happening in 1984 that caused Congress to want these guidelines, to begin the process of drawing up the guidelines?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: There was a lot of criticism at that time that the traditional method of criminal sentencing, which is letting the judge decide what he thinks is the appropriate sentence out of a huge range of possibilities was leading to wild disparities over the country, depending not so much on the nature of the crime and the criminal as on the judge. Soft judges were giving light sentences to people who did terrible things. Hard, tough judges were giving heavy sentences to people who did less serious things, and there was a convergence of liberal reformers who didn’t like these disparities and conservatives who were worried about some judges mollycoddling criminals, came together and said let’s have some uniformity, let’s tie these judges down to some guidelines so that the sentence doesn’t depend on who the judge is.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And how do the guidelines work? They’re very complicated.

MR. TAYLOR: Right. That principle was carried to very detailed specification initially by Congress but in more detail by the sentencing commission that Congress created of how much the sentence ought to be for every one of the zillion crimes in the federal criminal code, and then with adjustments upwards for the criminal record, and the, the embodiment of it is all this grid which is actually what a federal judge is supposed to use when he passes sentence. You look at the offense level and in this case, for example, these two police officers, they said, we start with six, because they violated the civil rights of Rodney King, and then–