This is something that has bothered me for a while…

and your friend and mine, Chuck Shepherd, of www.NewsoftheWeird.com had a bit on the basic injustice of the mandatory minimum drug sentences in his weekly newsletter. The article dates back to September, but is still available from the link listed below.

Long Term in Drug Case Fuels Debate on Sentencing
By Adam Liptak, September 12, 2004, The New York Times

Weldon H. Angelos, a 25-year-old producer of rap records, will be sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Salt Lake City for selling several hundred dollars in marijuana on each of three occasions, his first offenses. He faces 63 years in prison.

Laws that set mandatory minimum sentences require 55 of the 63 years because Mr. Angelos carried a gun while he sold the drugs.

"It would appear effectively to be a life sentence," the judge, Paul G. Cassell of Federal District Court there, wrote in a request to the prosecution and the defense for advice about whether he has any choice but to send the man to prison forever.

Judge Cassell, a brainy, conservative former law professor, surveyed the maximum sentences for other federal crimes. Hijacking an airplane: 25 years. Terrorist bombing intending to kill a bystander: 20 years. Second-degree murder: 14 years. Kidnapping: 13 years. Rape of a 10-year-old: 11 years.

He noted that Mr. Angelos would face a far shorter sentence in the courts of any state. In Utah, prosecutors estimate that he would receive five to seven years.

The Angelos case may provide a glimpse of the future. The constitutionality of federal sentencing guidelines was called into doubt by a Supreme Court decision in June, but that thinking does not extend to laws that set mandatory minimum sentences.

If the court strikes down the guidelines this fall, as many expect, judges will have much greater discretion, to the dismay of many prosecutors and politicians who worry that judges are not tough enough on crime.

Sentencing guidelines are set by the United States Sentencing Commission, an agency of the judicial branch. The guidelines were intended to limit judges' discretion without locking them into one-size-fits-all sentences. Mandatory minimums, in contrast, are enacted by Congress and are part of the criminal code.

"The guidelines always have some sort of escape," said Jeffrey B. Sklaroff of the New York office of Greenberg Traurig, a law firm that represents 29 former judges and prosecutors who filed a brief in support of Mr. Angelos in July. "A mandatory minimum means what it says: it is mandatory, and it is a minimum."

In Mr. Angelos's case, the drug offenses and related money-laundering convictions, for using drug money to buy a car and pay his rent, could subject him to eight years in prison. The mandatory minimums are for the additional offense of carrying a gun while selling drugs. Mr. Angelos carried a Glock pistol in an ankle holster when he sold marijuana on two occasions, though he did not brandish or use it. More guns were found in a briefcase and a safe at his home.

… Last year, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court told the American Bar Association that "in too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unwise and unjust.” The association appointed a commission, which recently issued a report urging the abolition of such sentencing.

"There are real economic and human costs," said Douglas A. Berman, an Ohio State University expert on sentencing law, "to putting everyone away for as long as humanly possible." …

So, Dear Reader, if Mr. Angelos had set off a bomb trying to kill some citizens while simultaneously raping a pre-teen, the most he could have gotten was 31 years - less than half of his sentence for selling marijuana while armed. In state court in Utah where he was nabbed, for his actual crime he would have gotten five to seven years!

Is there something wrong with that picture? Our whore-politicians [sorry, that analogy is unfair to whores], and the Democrats are included in that category; who know that being tough of crime looks good to the constituents, try to outdo each other to load on the years for drug crimes. I suspect that some of that is race-based also, though it’s merely a suspicion, - although there are those disparities in the sentences for crack and powder cocaine.

But I digress. The long sentences for drug crimes appear to do nothing but require more prisons, and the actual experts assure us the “War on Drugs” isn’t even going as well as Bush’s war in Iraq, and that’s turned into a debacle. Drugs remain freely available. We are locking up small-time dealers for small-time crimes and giving them sentences that are more suitable for mass murderers. Florida was turning violent felons loose early because the mandatory drug folks were taking up all the cell space. Our legislators have lost their minds.