Federal Sentencing Guidelines and Mandatory Minimums

While I awaited my sentence, the “new law” came into effect. I saw people coming in for similar offenses—smuggling drugs—only they were subject to a different standard than I was. Many of these inmates were unable to understand the legalese so I studied the guidelines to help decipher what they were facing. Not even their defense attorneys fully understood the implications of this new law.
What I found was a nightmare beyond belief.

The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, (it didn’t actually become law until 1987), was instituted to eliminate disparity of sentences from one judge to another. In reality it brought all judges up to the most severe standards in drug offenses.

The act created a system by which judges are forced to adhere. An offender is classified into 1 of 42 levels of severity for sentencing purposes. Each of these levels has a narrow prescribed range of sentences. In the case of drug offenses, the severity level is based almost entirely on the amount of drug with which the offender is charged with having possessed or sold.

In addition to these guidelines, minimum mandatory sentences were instated and parole abolished. A federal inmate must serve all but 54 days a year, which may be awarded as a sentence reduction for good behavior. In other words, an inmate will serve at least 17 years on a 20-year sentence. Absolutely.

Among other things, the law called for a minimum five-year sentence for having a firearm while in the commission of a drug offense, which must run consecutively to the first sentence. A second offense with a gun carries a minimum twenty-year mandatory sentence. Such requirements result in miscarriages of justice such as this one from the LA times (no longer a working link—gone to archives).

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-drugs19n ov19,0,7881608.story

A 25-year-old Utah man sold eight-ounce bags of marijuana on three occasions to an undercover officer. This week he was sentenced to 55 years in prison because he had a pistol strapped to his ankle during the deals.

That's more time than he would have received if he had hijacked a plane, beaten someone to death in a fight, detonated a bomb in an aircraft and provided weapons to support a foreign terrorist organization. The maximum sentence for all those crimes together is less than the mandatory minimum under federal sentencing rules for a small-time dope dealer carrying a gun. Those federal rules make California's three-strikes law -- recently upheld by voters -- look mild…

Any offense, which transpires within a certain distance from a school, requires the judge to double the sentence. Cops often use this to hammer someone they want when picking places to make a buy.

The maximum sentence for a drug offense became the death penalty. Yeah, you heard right. You can be sentenced to death for possession of drugs in the United States of America.

Here are a few reasons why the law is not fair. First, people defy classification into a numerical formula. The factors that may put someone in front of a judge are very complex. A guy who sells drugs to feed his family is not the same as a guy that sells to enrich himself and preys on the poor. The amount of drugs someone gets caught with is not necessarily a good indicator of his or her position in a network.

For instance, a driver may be told he can earn five thousand dollars for driving a vehicle a hundred miles. If the vehicle contains a ton of cocaine and he is caught, he will probably not outlive the sentence he receives. If a major dealer is caught with a minimal amount of drugs, the judge is forced to sentence him accordingly, in spite of the fact that this judge may know he is looking at a violent criminal—perhaps suspected of murders etc. He needs the discretion to hammer this guy.

As the law is written, the only discretion the judge has at sentencing time is to raise the level of culpability by no more than two levels for aggravating circumstances, or to lower it by no more than two levels for mitigating circumstances.

The guidelines also contain flaws that in effect serve to punish minorities and the poor more than those of the white race. Crack cocaine, favored by many blacks is multiplied by a factor of one hundred for sentencing purposes. Two ounces of crack rocks, (56 grams), multiplied by a hundred, places an offender into the category where minimum mandatory sentences come into effect (over five kilos). With a prior conviction this will mean twenty years.

Crystal meth, favored by poor working class whites is computed on a ten to one basis compared to the crystallized cocaine often used by rich white folks.

To be honest, the law is unduly harsh across the board. Its effect has been to swell the prison population to the point of bursting. The Bureau of Prisons budget has increased by almost 2,000 % since the day I was busted and the availability of drugs is higher than ever. Of the two million plus inmates in this country, over half are in for drugs. The average drug offender is awarded a sentence higher than those that commit violent predatory acts in the federal system.

Here is a site for those interested with tons of information concerning the war on drugs and the effect of the sentencing guidelines.

And all of this for substances that in my opinion are no more harmful than those legally allowed the rest of us (alcohol and tobacco).

This subject requires more time than I have, so I will leave it for now. But I hope to be back later with more.