But Alito's more of a wild card: As a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey, he might be more sympathetic toward sentencing requests from his former colleagues.
Wodicka's troubled characters are sympathetic, and his sentences are funny and surprising: "Lesbians loved driving one another around"; "There was a collection of beer mugs from all over the world, but mostly Milwaukee".
And there was this ruckus about the light sentence from a sympathetic judge for Turner in the Stanford sexual assault case.
He sometimes sounds less like a political commentator than like the star of a riveting and unusually vivid one-man play (he frequently dumps callers, even sympathetic ones, after about a sentence and a half), or a fugitive character out of a Philip Roth novel.
Although we are hoping for a more sympathetic peer review process, the first sentence raises interesting possibilities: if the sentence is true, it states it is false.
"We definitely do want to use the legislation to strengthen the law and we are definitely sympathetic to the issue of mandatory sentences after a second offence, after conviction for a second offence.
Mr. Shapiro mentioned the exposure at a hearing in which he successfully argued for the appointment of a mitigation expert, who will look for evidence that might make Mr. Muhammad seem more sympathetic if his trial proceeds to sentencing.
After serving relatively short prison sentences imposed by a sympathetic US district judge (three months for Dwight and one year for Steven), the US Department of Justice appealed, seeking a harsher punishment.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed sympathetic to trial judges called on to sentence defendants under the old law.
"If the facts of the case suggested to the judge that there was some sympathetic reason why the defendant should not face time in jail, they could sentence them to anything they wanted, including just probation".
Prosecutors were fairly robust in their defence of custodial and deterrent sentences, though occasionally admitting to the febrile atmosphere in which such sentencing took place, and occasionally talked in more sympathetic tones about the large number of first-time offenders.
