Sentencing rules under scrutiny

WASHINGTON — Marion Hungerford, a 52-year-old woman diagnosed with a mental illness, was convicted two years ago as an accomplice after her live-in boyfriend pleaded guilty to a series of armed robberies in Billings, Mont.

Her sentence: 159 years in federal prison.

The judge said federal sentencing rules gave him no choice. The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco agreed, as did the Supreme Court, which in May turned away her claim that the sentence was unconstitutional.

Increasingly, judges and legal activists — both conservative and liberal — point to cases like Hungerford's and say the federal sentencing system is out of whack. They are hoping that Congress or the Supreme Court will move to give judges leeway to impose shorter — and they say, fairer — prison terms. The high court will hear two cases in October that challenge mandatory minimum sentences.

"The worst aspect is the utter irrationality of the system," says Utah U.S. District Judge Paul G. Cassell. He's a Bush appointee and former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia when Scalia was a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. "When I have to sentence a mid-level drug dealer to more time than a murderer, something is wrong."

Three years ago, Cassell was forced to sentence Weldon Angelos, 24, to 59 years in prison for three marijuana sales of $350 each. On each occasion, Angelos had a gun in his car, which tacked on 55 years to his prison term.

"I believe that to sentence Mr. Angelos to prison for the rest of his life was unjust, cruel and even irrational," Cassell told a House committee in June. In contrast, he said, an airline hijacker or a terrorist who sets off a bomb in a public place would receive 20 to 25 years in prison.

The current system is a holdover of the mid-1980s and the so-called "war on drugs."

Congress set fixed prison terms for crimes involving guns and drugs and adopted sentencing guidelines that set prison terms for all other federal crimes, including white-collar offenses. It also eliminated parole, meaning people sent to federal prison cannot be released until they have served most of their terms.

The new rules have contributed to the nation's swelling prison population. Last year, 181,622 inmates were in federal prison, up from 24,363 in 1980, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.