The Federal Criminal Justice Clinic (FCJC) is the nation’s first legal clinic devoted to representing low-income clients charged with federal felonies. This year, we pursued national systemic reform projects and also represented individual clients in a variety of federal criminal cases. Alison Siegler, the Clinic’s Founding Director, and Clinical Professor of Law Judith Miller work together with students to advocate in these areas.

This year, Professor Siegler became the Lillian E. Kraemer Clinical Professor in Public Interest Law, the only endowed chair in the clinics. We are deeply grateful to Ms. Kraemer (’64) for her devotion to the law school’s clinical program.

Freedom Denied Systemic Reform Project

Students working with Professor Siegler on the FCJC’s Freedom Denied Project have continued to drive systemic change nationally in the area of federal pretrial jailing and detention, building on our 2022 study, Freedom Denied: How the Culture of Detention Created a Federal Jailing Crisis. This year, the Project’s work centered on a crisis that the Clinic was the first to uncover: For decades, federal judges across the country have been jailing people at their Initial Appearance hearings—the first bail hearing in a federal case—without first providing them a lawyer, in violation of their statutory and constitutional rights to counsel. Before the FCJC identified this deprivation-of-counsel crisis and documented its scope, neither scholars nor judges had recognized that the problem existed, much less appreciated its magnitude.

To remedy this profound problem, Professor Siegler has pioneered an approach to legal reform she calls “transformative advocacy,” which pairs rigorous data collection with targeted stakeholder interventions and real-time measurement of outcomes. Employing myriad methods beyond traditional litigation, Professor Siegler and FCJC students intervened across all three branches of government—through legislative engagement, executive policy reform, judicial advocacy, media outreach, trainings, and template motions.

This strategy has produced remarkable, measurable change. Before the Clinic began this work, judges were jailing unrepresented defendants in over 30% of the nation’s federal courts (30 of 94). New data the Clinic collected shows that, following our interventions, the problem now persists in just 5% of courts (5 of 94). The FCJC is continuing to press for comprehensive solutions to ensure that every person charged with a federal crime receives counsel at their first bail appearance, as the law requires.

Professor Siegler and FCJC alum Jaden Lessnick (’23) have written a law review article that presents this pathbreaking data, elucidates the statutory, regulatory, and constitutional doctrine underpinning the right to counsel at Initial Appearance hearings, and chronicles the arc of the Clinic’s transformative advocacy. See Alison Siegler & Jaden Lessnick, Pretrial Detention Without Counsel, 2026 Wisc. L. Rev. ___ (2026), University of Chicago Law School, Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper No. 25-38.

Federal Sentencing Guidelines Reform

Under Professor Siegler’s supervision, two FCJC students wrote a creative Public Comment to the U.S. Sentencing Commission about a proposed amendment to the Sentencing Guidelines that would have enabled clients across the country to receive a sentencing reduction based on their post-offense rehabilitative conduct. The amendment would have recognized a wide range of prosocial behavior—employment, education, drug treatment, and much more—that is currently analyzed only under the statutory sentencing factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a).

This project dovetailed with our Freedom Denied work, in that the amendment would provide significant benefits to people who are released, rather than jailed, pretrial. The amendment would thus make the bail decision even more consequential. Although the Commission did not pass the amendment this year, we will continue advocating for it. The amendment could make a significant difference in the many districts where judges are reluctant to grant § 3553(a) sentencing reductions and are more comfortable with Guidelines-based reductions.

This year, Professor Siegler also served as the Guest Editor of a two-part special issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter (FSR) entitled Modernizing Federal Drug Sentencing, together with FCJC alum Grant Delaune (’25). The special issue continues a conversation that the U.S. Sentencing Commission began when it convened a roundtable on federal drug sentencing in November 2024, in which Professor Siegler participated.

The first FSR installment, published in May 2026, gathers federal judges, scholars, and practitioners from around the country to examine whether, why, and how the drug guidelines should be reformed—asking, among other questions, whether drug quantity should remain the touchstone for culpability, whether fentanyl sentences should change in light of the opioid epidemic, and whether the requirements for the safety valve should be loosened. Professor Siegler and Grant co-authored the issue’s Editor’s Introduction, which frames this reform conversation and situates it alongside the Commission’s recent amendments to the drug and mitigating role guidelines. See Modernizing Federal Drug Sentencing, 38:2 Fed. Sent’g Rep. 85 (2026). Professor Siegler and Grant also co-authored an article that lays out their proposal for a fairer and more equitable drug guideline. They propose calibrating sentences to the function a person actually performs in a trafficking enterprise, rather than to the flawed metric of drug quantity. See Alison Siegler & Grant Delaune, Function Over Form in Federal Drug Sentencing, 38:2 Fed. Sent’g Rep. 115 (2026).

For the second installment of the double issue Professor Siegler and Grant co-authored an introduction. See Alison Siegler & Grant Delaune, Introduction, 38:3 Fed. Sent’g Rep. 167 (forthcoming 2026).

Federal Sentencing Guidelines Retroactivity Project

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines Retroactivity Project has been underway since the 2023–2024 academic year, when FCJC student teams under Professor Miller’s supervision began representing four incarcerated clients seeking sentence reductions under the newly passed Amendment 821 to the Sentencing Guidelines. This year, the Project involved (1) related advocacy before the United States Sentencing Commission, and (2) successfully litigating to obtain a sentence reduction for the last of our four clients.

U.S. Sentencing Commission Advocacy

Students working with Professor Miller have continued to advocate before the Sentencing Commission. During the 2024–2025 academic year, student teams submitted two rounds of Public Comments asking the Commission to change its sentencing recommendations and sentence reduction rules for individuals who are also subject to another term of imprisonment. The Commission accepted two of the Clinic team’s recommendations and offered another Clinic team suggestion as a “proposed priority” for the 2025–2026 amendment cycle. Continuing this multi-year project, this year Professor Miller and a student team filed a Public Comment urging the Commission to take up that proposed priority, and also asked the Commission to expand retroactive sentence reductions more generally. The underlying legal issues are complex and affect hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals.

Litigation

This academic year, the fourth of the Clinic teams’ Amendment 821 sentence reduction motions was granted, after multiple rounds of briefing. (The Clinic teams’ three other motions for sentence reductions were granted in previous academic years.) In the fourth case, our request for relief turned on a circuit split that itself rested on two technical legal issues, both of which student teams also raised in our Public Comments to the Commission. First, Guideline § 5G1.3 contains a notoriously confusing set of rules for crediting time served on a related term of imprisonment. Second, the circuits are divided over whether retroactive sentence reductions such as Amendment 821 should include § 5G1.3’s credit “adjustment” for time served. Our client had received just such a credit adjustment for time served under § 5G1.3 at his original sentencing. The question before the court was whether he could receive that same credit adjustment in a sentence reduction proceeding.

The district court agreed with the Clinic team that our client should receive the same credit adjustment in his sentence reduction proceeding as he had at the original sentencing. The court concurred that an analogous Seventh Circuit case had already characterized adjustments, such as the one our client had received, to be part of the operative sentencing range. Our client was eligible for relief because his sentence reduction proceeding reduced that operative range.

Individual Client Representation

FCJC students zealously represented individual clients charged in complex federal criminal cases, meeting with our clients at the jail and in the office, combing through voluminous discovery, developing case theory, writing motions and briefs, meeting with witnesses, negotiating with the government, and presenting oral argument to federal judges.

One student team supervised by Professor Siegler obtained a reduced sentence for a client who played a minimal role in a federal drug case. The students wrote an excellent sentencing motion, first laying out our client’s personal history and the circumstances that brought him to this point, and then advancing multiple legal arguments. They also developed a comprehensive release plan and explained how our client’s commitment to reforming himself lessened the need to protect the public under the sentencing statute. The team then argued on our client’s behalf in court, and their compelling presentation persuaded the judge to impose a below-Guidelines sentence—10 months shorter than what the government sought and requiring our client to serve very little additional time.

A second team, also supervised by Professor Siegler, moved to suppress evidence the FBI seized from our client during what we believe was an unconstitutional stop. The students filed multiple briefs and held a suppression hearing. In their post-hearing submission, they marshaled the testimony and the governing Fourth Amendment law into a forceful case for suppression. After a hard-fought battle, the motion was ultimately denied.

In a third case, students working with Professor Siegler convinced the government to agree that our client was eligible for a safety valve reduction. The team first wrote a detailed letter dissecting a complex area of Seventh Circuit law. Two students then pressed these points in person with the leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Securing the safety valve will make all the difference for our client, who would otherwise be facing approximately 20 years in prison, including a mandatory minimum of 10 years. With the safety valve, the judge is no longer bound to impose the 10-year minimum, which will enable next year’s students to advocate for a significantly lower sentence.

In a fourth matter, one of Professor Siegler’s teams filed a powerful motion on behalf of a client charged with fraud who suffers from several serious medical conditions. To develop expertise on our client’s medical needs, the students immersed themselves in the scholarly literature. Their motion wove together the medical records and that scholarship to justify a time-served sentence, bolstering the request with information about the extraordinary care our client provides for his family and his low risk of recidivism. The hearing was continued, but several just-graduated alums will return to present the sentencing argument in September.

A fifth student team represented a client in a federal bank robbery case over the course of the 2024–25 and 2025–26 academic years, under the supervision of Professor Miller. Among other things, this year’s team obtained a rare defense victory for severance under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 14. Our former client’s co-defendant had been undergoing months of delayed competency proceedings, with no end in sight. Research revealed only a handful of cases nationwide where courts had addressed trial delay for a co-defendant’s protracted competency proceeding. After reading the team’s motion, the court ultimately set a trial date and agreed to sever our client’s case from his co-defendant’s case under certain circumstances as trial neared.

A sixth student team represents a client in an ongoing felon-in-possession case, under the supervision of Professor Miller. The FCJC team began working with our client immediately before his first appearance in federal court. However, it took months before Cook County dismissed his pending state charges arising out of the same circumstances. During that time, the Clinic team regularly visited our client in the Cook County jail and drafted a successful motion requesting pretrial release based on our client’s transformation and release plan. Our client subsequently pled guilty, and a new student team will litigate his sentencing proceedings during the 2026–27 academic year.