Calif. PTSD Vet Faces 2-Strikes Cruelty - Time is Short

Sargent Binkley, a captain in the United States Army Rangers, served as a peacekeeper in Bosnia and as a drug warrior in Central America.

At one point he was ordered to open fire on a truck that contained a civilian teenage boy, an act that haunts him to this day. While on duty in Honduras, he fractured his pelvis and dislocated a hip. This injury was consistently misdiagnosed by Army physicians over the next several years, resulting in chronic pain and an addiction to prescription painkillers.

Support Sargent Binkley
Justice, not Blindness

To satiate his drug addiction, he held up two drugstores with a gun he says was unloaded.  He then turned himself in, and he faces sentencing on Thursday next week.

Because Binkley used a gun, and not a sword or grenade or some other weapon, California law mandates that the prosecutor set the sentence rather than the judge, and recommends that the sentence be twelve years in prison.  Twelve years.

You can help.

Mandatory sentencing laws, rules which take matters of an individual's liberty out of the hands of an impartial arbiter, make a mockery of justice.  Binkley has already been in jail for over a year and has been receiving drug addiction treatment.  Should anyone have any doubt that the sentence is far too harsh:

The Mountain View pharmacist himself has written supporting leniency for Sargent, as have several veterans organizations, military colleagues of Sargent, and concerned California citizens. You can join them!

Despite the "mandatory" nature of the law, the prosecutor has discretion over what sentence to apply.  The most effective path to justice in Binkley's case is to write to the prosecutors in the case for a reduced sentence.  Friends of Binkley built the informative Support Sargent Binkley website, including addresses and writing suggestions, on short notice.  I gladly accepted a request to write this diary in support.

Sargent is due to be sentenced on Thursday, September 20, 2007 in the Sunnyvale Courthouse of the Santa Clara County Superior Court.

For more on Binkley's case, please see this comprehensive article:

San Francisco Chronicle
Military vet charged with pharmacy holdups blames drug addiction
John Coté, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, September 3, 2007

Please read the website through, and please write today, as I am.  It would be a service to justice and liberty, both Binkley's and all of ours.

•  Please write -- thanks!

  (Gotta run; will be back in an hour...)

  by Simplify on Wed Sep 12, 2007 at 06:52:58 PM PDT

•  Short end of the stick

  Thank you for posting this - Binkley is really getting the short end of the stick from the justice system. No one's saying he should be completely exonerated, but I do think he deserves an appropriate sentence (2-5) and drug rehab, not incarceration for 12-20 years. Mandatory minimums, like 3 strikes, are a bad idea because it takes the judge's ability to take context into consideration.

  And here, his context is pretty compelling - time served guarding mass graves in Bosnia and fighting drug wars in Honduras (not sure the latter one is a great use of the military, but as a soldier, you do what you're told), and then the painkiller addiction came from the military injury and military treatment. No one's saying the guy's innocent - he admits that he deserves punishment himself - but if social context doesn't matter at all, then we've truly hyper-quantified our society in a very scary way.

  by ryouatt on Wed Sep 12, 2007 at 09:30:40 PM PDT