Mandated sentences come under attack
Washington (AP 5/10/93)

Stringent sentencing guidelines and long mandatory terms for minor drug offenders enacted in the 1980s are coming under fire from federal judges as Attorney General Janet Reno moves toward moderating the policy.

Two federal judges from NY said recently they would no longer take drug cases to protest the sentencing requirements and U.S. drug policy, and a federal judge in the District of Columbia declared one mandatory sentence unconstitutional and refused to impose it.

"I need a rest from the oppressive sense of futility that these drug

cases leave," Jack B. Weinstein, a 72 year old senior judge in New York, wrote to his colleagues.

"I believe that in the future we will look back on this horrendous period of overcharging and over-punishing as a temporary American aberration," he said, adding he would take no more drug cases in his court.

Not surprisingly, defense lawyers concur.

"The bottom line is they're not working," said Nancy Hollander, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

"The mandatory minimum sentences were enacted during the mid 80s as part of the war on drugs. It hasn't stopped the war on drugs, it's just made us fight it against our own people," she said in a telephone interview from Santa Fe, NM.

In an Alabama case cited by Families Against Mandatory Minimums, 20 year-old Charisse Richardson is serving a 10-year mandatory sentence for federal drug conspiracy.

Richardson, an 18-year-old high school senior at the time, was convicted for telling an undercover informant where to meet her boyfriend to buy LSD. The boyfriend, who pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, was sentenced to five years.

Judges, defense lawyers and the attorney general voiced concern over federal statutes that require such prison sentences of 10 years or more for first-time offenders convicted of being merely minor participants in a drug deal.

At a gathering of drug experts last week, Reno said mandatory minimum sentences need to be reexamined and made "consistent with the resources we have to achieve the one goal that these people should never commit another crime."

While dangerous criminals must be jailed for as long as possible, law enforcers should look for ways to rehabilitate nonviolent first-time offenders and return them to their communities, she said.

A U.S. Sentencing Commission report also found that mandatory sentences for drug and weapons crimes are applied more often to blacks, and that street-level drug couriers are more likely to get long jail terms than drug kingpins and distributors.

Rep. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., who heads the House Judiciary Committee's crime panel, said he is receptive to some modifications in the laws

"What my committee is exploring is a safety valve. There are certain cases that deserve a safety valve- usually first- and second-time drug offenders who haven't committed another crime and are sentenced to inordinately long amounts of time," he said.