This principle becomes particularly important when the federal definition of illegal conduct is one that is simply not comprehensible and acts more as a trap than as a guideline.

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Some agents have told me that they carry a a copy of the Federal Sentencing Guideline Table as a visual aid in showing targets how much prison time they could be looking at should they consider NOT cooperating.

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As a general broad brush guideline, it can be helpful to compare where we are to the general public.

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There is also a guideline that says all corrections unfold in three waves, usually labelled by analysts as ABC.

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Recently, rising prices led the government to issue a guideline to tighten its grip on the real estate sector, raising taxes by as much as 20% for transactions.

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As I noted here last week, federal judges have a tendency to go easy on tax cheats, granting them below guideline sentences far more often than most other categories of offenders.

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