While your point is valid, after US v. Booker, federal sentencing guidelines became exactly that - guidelines. The actual maximum punishments are defined by st

While your point is valid, after US v. Booker, federal sentencing guidelines became exactly that - guidelines. The actual maximum punishments are defined by statute. If you catch a federal judge on a bad day, he or she can indeed sentence a defendant to the maximum allowed by statute for each count, and run all of them consecutive to each other. This is how some defendants wind up with multi-century federal sentences. Example: Shalom Weiss was sentenced to 845 years in prison for a white collar crime (current projected release date: November 23, 2754). One of his co-defendants received 750 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholam_Weiss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholam_Weiss This rarely happens, however, and likely would not have happened in this case. More likely than not, he would have accepted a plea and wound up doing probation or a very light sentence (~6 months) in a minimum security prison. But a much longer sentence was in fact legally possible.