Judge Questions Long Sentence in Drug Case
 

This is just plain wrong. It's from the New York Times (reg. required) so I'm pasting a snip from the article. Not that I'm condoning drug dealing but I've seen this inappropriate sentencing thing so many times while working in the prison system. A rapist or child molester will get a couple years yet someone holding a little bag of pot gets the book thrown at them. It just doesn't make sense to me.



SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 16 - In a case that has spurred intense soul-searching in legal circles, a 25-year-old convicted drug dealer, who was arrested two years ago for selling small bags of marijuana to a police informant, was sentenced on Tuesday to 55 years in prison.

The judge who sentenced him, Paul G. Cassell of the United States District Court here, said that he pronounced the sentence "reluctantly" but that his hands were tied by a mandatory-minimum law that required the imposition of 55 years on Weldon H. Angelos because he had a gun during at least two of the drug transactions.

"I have no choice," Judge Cassell said to Mr. Angelos, who seemed frozen in place as the extent of the sentence became apparent.

The judge then urged Mr. Angelos's lawyer, Jerome H. Mooney, not only to appeal his decision but to ask President Bush for clemency once all appeals were exhausted. He also urged Congress to set aside the law that made the sentence mandatory.

Judge Cassell said that sentencing Mr. Angelos to prison until he is 70 years old 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.

I think the best place to fight the war on drugs is inside the home/family. Legalize (and therefore de-mystify) pot. Since everyone can pretty much grow skunkweed in the basement, there is no way to regulate it - just legalize it, step aside and let it take its own course. The best way to stop drug money from exiting the country is to let folks grow it locally. The Central and South American pot trade would dry up overnight.

This is just fucking nuts. Where's the threat to society? Another sad element not discussed in this snippet is that there's a decent chance that any given pot peddler grows the stuff themselves and, therefore, offer no chance to law enforcement to "work their way up the ladder" and offer the (so-called) dealer a chance at a reasonable plea bargin in exchange for ratting out his supplier. The pot distribution channels are flattening out - there are fewer and fewer "Mr. Bigs" behind the universe of dealers.

And the real irony is that its not "the people" who are demanding this. Those convicted of crimes for which the people demand long sentences are not given long sentences and are let back on the streets to continue raping and pillaging.

Somebody needs to fix this crap.

You can get longer now for taking a camcorder into a cinema than rape as well. So what's it like living in a corperate-fascist state?

So what is the mandatory sentence for a camcorder in the cinema?

Without looking anything up, all jaguar said was that the maximum for camcorder crime was longer than the minimum for rape. No mandatories were mentioned.

According to this bit, he wasn't sentenced to 55 years merely because of the drugs. It would appear the firearm played a part in this too. And you can't blame the judge. He follows the law and if the law says X years minimum then that's what he has to give. If the law had said less years, then this guy would have gotten less years. Not that the guy should've been dealing drugs in the first place...

Our political leaders are too cowardly to touch these problems. They all want to puff out their chests and be tougher on crime than the others. If you do anything to fix the problem, you are "soft on crime."

If I recall correctly, federal LSD sentencing has also been very screwy for over a decade now. When they re-wrote the sentencing guidelines for LSD a while ago, they did it sloppily. LSD is usually applied in liquid form to some sort of carrier that is placed on the tongue. Usually paper, but sometimes a sugar cube. The law was written so the weight of the carrier material was counted as part of the drug quantity. So if you have a drop of LSD soaked into a sugar cube, it weighs as much as 1000 drops of pure LSD would. You get sentenced as a dealer even if you only have one dose of LSD. I've read several stories of unlucky kids caught with one hit of LSD going to jail for the rest of their lives. The lawmakers know about this problem, but nobody is going to fix it, because they will be marked as soft on crime.

Same thing with rape in prison. It's a system-wide problem that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody cares. Many people think it's actually funny.

Don't expect a Republican controlled congress to do anything about any of these problems. They won't lift a finger to help the downtrodden.

Definitely not. He encouraged the defense to appeal based on constitutionality of the law, and to request clemency from Bush. Lotsa luck with that.

If this judge was so upset by being obligated to impose a mandatory sentence on the drug dealer, why then, did he only impose a 22 year term on the murderer just because he was legally 'able' to? I take that to mean that he was able to impose a longer sentence too, but he chose not to.

I took that to mean he could have only sent the murderer down for 22 years.

Then wouldn't he have said 'legally obligated' instead of 'legally able'?

No, he was able to send him down for a maximum of 22 years, he as not obligated to do that. Thus the sentence handed down in that case was less than 22 years.

Or he thought that 22 years was appropriate for the murder, and (for example) 3 would have been appropriate for the drug guy. If he was forced to give the drug guy 55 years, that's no reason to apply the same inflated sentence when he wasn't required to. Either way.

The latest bill in congress say 3 years for video camera in the theater, but I think they have to prove intent to distribute. Or just railroad you. :eyebrow:
Who are you waiting for, Superman?