Former federal judge is striving for balance

When Utah's youngest federal judge announced he was stepping down from the bench last September, many in the legal community wondered why someone would leave behind a lifetime appointment by the U.S. president.

Paul G. Cassell was 42 when he was appointed to the bench, but 5 1/2 years later the former federal prosecutor and University of Utah law professor announced he would return to teaching and take up a new career in legal advocacy.

"One of the things I've found out is that now nobody stands up when I enter a room," he joked.

Sitting in his temporary office at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, Cassell told the Deseret Morning News that, as a federal judge, he felt there were several areas in federal law that were out of balance, particularly in the areas of minimum-mandatory sentencing and prosecution of some illegal immigrants. He saw some aspects of federal law caught in a vortex of political competitiveness for tougher sentences pushed by members of Congress.

While it is constitutional for Congress to impose mandatory sentences, "is it wise for them to impose these draconian mandatory minimum sentences? I guess that's where I would urge Congress to introduce some more flexibility," Cassell said.

"There's a kind of ratchet effect where the Republicans will say, 'We want a five-year mandatory minimum sentence,' and Democrats will say, 'We'll up you, we want a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence,' and you have people ratcheting up sentences to the point where any reasonable observer would think we've gone too high, but there's no political incentive to undo the mischief."

Cassell said, in his mind, it takes political courage to step up and say the punishment does not fit the crime.

In what he calls one of the most difficult cases he handled in his judicial career, Cassell said he felt he had to speak out on a mandatory sentence that he was compelled to mete out against young drug dealer Weldon Angelos.

Due to a minimum mandatory sentence imposed by Congress against drug dealers who carry firearms, Angelos was sentenced to a mandatory 55 years in federal prison on his first-ever drug conviction for dealing marijuana.

Cassell wrote a lengthy legal opinion on Angelos' sentence, which he sent to Congress and the president. That opinion earned him nationwide praise from legal scholars.

It wasn't the first time Cassell made the national spotlight. In his 2004 decision in United States v. Croxford, Cassell became the first judge in the country to hold that federal sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional. A few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Cassell in the 2005 landmark case United States v. Booker, which found federal sentencing guidelines should be advisory and not mandated for judges to follow.