Mandatory Sentences

I was asked in one of my on-campus interviews last year with a lawyer from a San Francisco firm what my least favorite class was in law school. The answer was criminal law. (Probably the same answer today.) He mentioned to me that he had just worked on a death penalty appeal, so he was curious about my answer.

Rather than saying that my professor made class unenjoyable and painful (true, but not the only reason), I gave another honest answer: I would get too emotionally invested in my cases when someone's life is at stake. Corporate negotiations are important, but it's not the same life-or-death battle as trying to save an innocent person from lethal injection. I think I might get invested in the lives and futures of my criminal defendants to the point of paralysis, and I don't know how I would cope with representing an innocent person who gets convicted.

I'm also not that interested in the theory of criminal law. But an article I read today awakened the little interest I have in criminal law, and made me a little angry. Short version? I am not a fan of mandatory minimum sentencing.

Basically what happened in this case was that a 25 year old man sold 2 small bags of marijuana to a police informant. Since the man had a gun on him, he was sentenced to 55 years in prison, based on the mandatory minimum laws. For selling 2 bags of marijuana, he'll be imprisoned until he's 80. He had a gun in an ankle holster which he never took out. But because it was on his person, he gets to rot in jail for most of his life.

To me, that's outrageous. You don't go to jail until you're 80 for making a mistake that, while illegal, hasn't harmed anyone. It's marijuana, for goodness sake. Rapists and murderers get sent to jail for less than 55 years. You've got to be kidding me.

One excerpt from the article:

Judge Cassell said that sentencing Mr. Angelos to prison until he is 70 years old [I don't get this: if he's 25 + 55 sentence = 80?] was "unjust, cruel and even irrational," but that the law that forced him to do so had not proved to be unconstitutional and thus had to stand. The sentence was all the more ironic, he said, because only two hours earlier he had been legally able to impose a sentence of 22 years on a man convicted of aggravated second-degree murder for beating an elderly woman to death with a log. That crime, he argued, was far more serious.

The judge told the attorney to appeal the decision and ask the President for clemency, and asked Congress to put aside the law.

While I don't doubt that drug dealers are the source of many crimes in society, I think what the AUSA had to say about the guy was a little extreme. He called the guy:

a "purveyor of poison," and said he had been dealing drugs for more than four years before his arrest. Carrying a gun in the commission of such crimes, he said, meant that Mr. Angelos was prepared "to kill other human beings."

Maybe he's violent. Maybe he would have hurt someone with the gun. Maybe it's true that he dealt drugs for four years. Maybe maybe maybe. But the fact of the matter is that he never took the gun out to hurt anyone. He didn't kill anyone. He didn't rape anyone. He didn't even injure anyone. All he did was sell drugs to a police informant in a completely nonviolent manner.

Mandatory minimum sentencing takes discretion out of the criminal justice system that needs to be there. There are many different goals of criminal punishment, one of which is rehabilitation. The man is 25. He has an entire life ahead of him, a wife, two sons, and he made a mistake. People can change, especially when they're so young. Are we just going to give up on people like this when they can change and lead rewarding lives? Is it really better for society to pay to lock them up for the rest of their lives? It makes me sick to think that a mistake like this could cost someone their life, while someone else can take a life and serve less time. Laws like this just don't mix with me.