Mandatory Sentencing and the War on Drugs

Nothing has destroyed the checks and balances system more than mandatory sentencing. Take this depressing case, where the judge adamantly oppossed the 55-year sentence he was forced to give a 25-year-old low-level pot dealer. From the NY Times:

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.

. . . The question of Mr. Angelos's sentence was at the center of a debate as to whether it was fair to send a minor drug dealer to prison for 55 years when a murderer, rapist or terrorist, according to the same sentencing directives, would ordinarily receive no more than about 25 years.

During a court hearing in September, Judge Cassell posed a question to the opposing legal teams in the case: "Is there a rational basis," he asked, "for giving Mr. Angelos more time than the hijacker, the murderer, the rapist?"

On a different note about drug sentencing, check out this story about a judge who gave a pot dealer the choice between prison and the army. I thought this kind of stuff only happened in the movies.