Drug Sentencing: The Law of Unintended Consequences
Tonya Denise Drake, a 28-year-old mother of four, mailed a package for a man she met in a parking lot, earning $47.40 and a 10-year jail sentence. Jason Cohn, 19, was sentenced to a decade in jail for shipping 12 grams of blotter paper containing LSD for a fellow Deadhead who, unknown to Cohn, had been busted by the feds. Michael Irish, a 44-year-old carpenter from Portland, Ore., spent three hours helping to unload hashish from a truck and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Keith Edwards, 19, sold crack cocaine to a federal informant, who then set up four more buys to accumulate enough crack to qualify Edwards for the 10-year sentence he is now serving.
A decade into our nation’s most recent infatuation with mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession, the horror stories continue to pile up. In 1993, 60 percent of the 87,000 people in federal prisons were serving time on drug convictions, up from 22 percent in 1980. Like Drake, Cohn, Irish and Edwards, half of these prisoners were first-time offenders. Had they chosen to rob a bank or rape someone or even murder someone, their sentences would probably be less than the mandatory no-parole sentences Congress has been writing into law since 1984.
Nor are mandatory minimum sentences limited to the federal government. Forty-nine states have their own mandatory laws, such as Michigan’s “650 Lifer” law, which requires life sentences for possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine. In that state, some 150 people are sitting in prison for life for cocaine possession, perhaps half of them first offenders like Gary Fannon Jr., now 25 and seven years into the life sentence he got for a drug transaction that he merely helped to arrange. (See RS 638 and RS 664.)
Compulsory drug sentencing is kept alive by fear-mongering. After creating the first set of harsh mandatory-drug-sentencing laws, the infamous Boggs Act, in the 1950s, then repealing them as unworkable in 1970, Congress plunged back into mandatory minimums with the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Since then, stiffening or adding to the mandatory minimums has been an election-year ritual, with the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 and the 1990 crime bill. The 1992 crime bill died at the end of the congressional session only because of the gun-control controversy.
New to her job, Attorney General Janet Reno appeared to have taken a position on mandatory minimums based on common sense and experience. Unwisely, she spoke up: “We are not going to solve the crime problem by sending everyone to prison for as long as we can get them there and throwing away the key.” Apparently chastened by the administration, she has backed off. Her office now insists: “Attorney General Reno never was against mandatory minimum sentences. She said we need to look at them and determine who they’re affecting. She is still saying the same exact thing.”
President Clinton declined an invitation to talk to Rolling Stone on mandatory minimums, and members of the Senate and House judiciary committees, fearful of being called soft on crime, tend to be reluctant to discuss the subject publicly. Of 10 key members polled for their opinion for this article, only Orrin Hatch, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, responded. “He’s recognized the problem of inflexibility when dealing with drug cases,” a spokesman said. “He’s willing to try to give the judges some measure of flexibility. The problem is, people can’t agree on a definition.”
The original purpose of mandatory minimums was to eliminate discrepancies between the sentences given for the same drug crimes in more liberal and more conservative areas of the nation. But in guaranteeing that liberal regions punish criminals adequately, Congress couldn’t resist the opportunity to proclaim its moral indignation. So it created particularly punitive mandatory sentences –– five years in prison for possession of a gram of LSD or five grams of cocaine, 10 years in prison for growing 1,000 marijuana plants or selling a kilogram of heroin.
Most would agree a kilo is a lot of heroin, and the guy who peddles it in a schoolyard should probably go to prison for a decade. But in real life, the situation is seldom so clear. Under the law, the guy who sells the heroin to schoolchildren and the buddy who watches out for the police are guilty of the same crime. The girlfriend who gives a DEA informant the boyfriend’s phone number and the mook who lets the kilo sit in his locker overnight for $10 are also guilty of the same crime. Whereas previously a judge might vary their sentences to reflect varying degrees of culpability, under mandatory minimums, that latitude no longer exists, and federal judges are incensed about it.
“Without any elbow room, you cripple the whole system,” says Judge William J. Bauer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. Milton Shadur, senior U.S. district judge in Illinois, concurs: “In a word, mandatory minimum sentences, as they operate in the federal system, particularly in drug cases, are a disaster.”
At least one federal judge, J. Lawrence Irving, resigned from the bench rather than impose the sentences. “It’s insanity,” says Irving, now a private mediator. “We’re putting young people in prison for 10 years on their first offense without possibility of parole, a longer sentence than is served in many states for murder… I couldn’t in good conscience impose sentences I felt were Draconian.”
Despite growing opposition, mandatory minimums have cast a widening net. In 1984, 10 percent of federal defendants were subject to mandatory minimum sentences; by 1990, 20 percent were.
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