From TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime:
The defendant is 32, with an IQ of 72. He’s a low level drug dealer. Under the federal mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, the Judge had no choice but to impose a sentence of life without parole. The Judge is angry.
Judge David N. Hurd said child rapists and murderers will go free on parole while Justin D. Powell languishes in prison for life, largely because the defendant was convicted of drug crimes twice during his teenage years, more than a decade before the instant offense. Because of those prior convictions, the sole sentencing option was life, Hurd said.“The increment of harm in this case bears no rational relationship to the increment of punishment that I must impose,” Hurd said at a sentencing proceeding last week in Utica, N.Y. “This is what occurs when Congress sets [a] mandatory minimum sentence which distorts the entire judicial process… . As a result, I am obligated to and will now impose this unfair and, more important, unjust sentence.”
Read the entire entry at TalkLeft for more on the injustice of mandatory sentencing.