Mandatory minimums sound good but are unjust

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Weldon Angelos, a young Utah native who was an aspiring record producer and father of two boys. He is now serving a 55-year prison term. To be sure, Angelos was no angel prior to his arrest. During two undercover buys of $350 worth of marijuana, he was found to have possessed a firearm. Police later discovered several other handguns at his home. Because local law enforcers chose to pursue the case in federal court, Angelos faced draconian sentencing laws — known as "mandatory minimums" — that ignore any and all mitigating circumstances, including the defendant's lack of criminal history. Under the mandatory minimum scheme, Angelos — a first-time, low-level offender — was effectively sentenced to life in prison for merely possessing (but never brandishing) a firearm in connection with small sales of marijuana.

To put this in perspective, Weldon Angelos' punishment is far in excess of the federal sentence for an aircraft hijacker, a second-degree murderer, a kidnapper, a child rapist, and a spy who gathers top secret information, all of whom are undeniably serious offenders deserving harsh penalties.

Ironically, and irrationally, the sentence in this case is more than twice the federal sentence for a kingpin of a major drug trafficking ring that causes a death. Even Manuel Noriega — the former Panamanian dictator who, among other things, converted his nation into a narco-state and was guilty of massive cocaine trafficking — received a lower federal sentence (40 years). Moreover, had Angelos been sentenced in local state court, he likely would have been released from custody by now.

This was too much for Judge Paul Cassell, a Bush appointee and respected jurist who, prior to becoming a federal trial court judge, was nationally recognized for his support of capital punishment, opposition to so-called Miranda rights, and, in turn, his advocacy for the rights of crime victims. In a lengthy, scholarly opinion, Judge Cassell called Angelos' sentence "unjust, cruel and irrational," describing in detail the gross disproportionality between crime and punishment. This case demeaned the victims of actual crime, Cassell opined, noting that two ruthless convicts he had sentenced that very day — one a brutal murderer and the other a lifelong criminal most recently convicted of carjacking — would be eligible for release before Angelos.