Those few of us attuned to the cries of the downtrodden shouldn't be satisfied in the recent SCOTUS decision of
United States v. Booker. The opinion will do little to curb our appetite for gorging our prisons with nonviolent drug offenders. Even so, rags like the
Washington Times are already busy hanging the frame that the decision gives judges the power to disregard what the hallowed congress decreed in favor of inflicting lenient sentences on a defenseless public at their elitist discretion. What the Washington Times doesn't say is that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines are only a manifestation of the real problem, the immoral enactment of draconian
mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses.
The Supreme Court decisions do not affect mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the laws that Congress passed requiring fixed sentences for certain federal offenses, mainly involving drugs and weapons. Judges must still impose these statatory measures mandated by congress, which are usually 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years in length.
The Court's decision only affects federal sentencing guidelines, giving judges increased discretion. Unfortunately, mandatory minimum sentencing laws remain untouched and could become even more attractive to members of Congress who want to rein in judges.
For example, planting more than a hundred tiny marijuana seedlings will land you a "guideline range" of between five to forty years in prison.
Before the decision, with certain enhancements, it used to be that the judge could be mandated by law to sentence you to even more than the minimum five-year term, depending on a myriad of particulars--whether you possessed a firearm, whether you were convicted of previous drug felonies, whether there was a minor involved in the transaction(s). All the Booker decision has accomplished in terms of sentencing fairness is to provide federal judges discretion to essentially sentence defendants to less than forty years in prison for a hundred marijuana plants. But, unless the prosecutor demands otherwise, you're still guaranteed to get the five-year minimum mandatory sentence.
So congratulations growers of a plant that hasn't proved to be the sole cause of death for one single person in recorded medical history. We'll welcome you back to civilized society after you've learned your five-year lesson. With any luck you won't miss your son and daughter's graduation from high school. Advocacy groups like FAMM, who have witnessed in minutia the carnage that the genocide on drug users has caused American families, are not exactly jumping up and down in praise and closing up shop. Oh, the SC did what it could, they'll say. But it is not nearly enough.
Here are basic questions that people who care about fairness in American life should be asking: Why is our incarceration rate exponentially higher than any other first world nation? Why is the system constructed in order to systematically remove American citizens from American society? Why are more than 500,000 nonviolent drug offenders disappeared into our nation's prison systems? (a figure BTW that is just short of the total number of incarcerated people in all of Europe combined).
The answer has some to do with lawyers more concerned about "debate ethics" than about the basic morality surrounding the practices upon which they engage. The whole sense of moral outrage over mandatory minimum sentences is desensitized in courtrooms and legal firms from coast to coast. Many in the legal profession declare their solidarity, but those in closest proximity to the damage caused by these laws offer little more than lip service--preferring to remain an arm's length from the fray.
A cursory glance at history manifests a plethora of anonymous individuals engaging in heinous acts such as sending runaway slaves back to face their Southern masters, or drawing up contracts to steal Native American land, and doing them all in the name of our laws. But the daily headlines drown out the fact that such practices are continuing on this very day in dozens of courtrooms throughout the country.
And it is all being done in YOUR name: The People of the United States of America.
When the oil begins to the surface, the legal punditry's executive summary of the Booker decision returns us to purity, to a time when northern lawyers explained to abolitionist crowds that a new precedent had been set declaring that captured runaway slaves were no longer to be hanged for attempting to escape. Now they were only to be subjected to five to forty lashes and a trip back to the plantation. John Brown eat your hat. What great progress in fight for all men to be treated equally!
The realities of the lows to which a federal drug prosecutor will sink are shockingly similar to the slave reprocessing agent. Their abuses take place in the secret confines of cavernous courtrooms where no sane individual would by choice venture. All who dare have become infected with ambivalence and cynicism. The federal justice system has reached a tragic frenzy, a place where even public defenders advise clients to, "plead guilty now and save the court the trouble of convicting you later." Presence of guilt has become a point of minor squabble because the "game" is fixed. The rules of procedure all but assure a defendant no chance to win an acquittal in a drug case (unless he has millions to pay for Roy Black). Furthermore, federal PDs are notorious for not even listening to the particulars of their client's cases before giving this advice: "go talk to the DEA. I won't be there, but tell them everything they want to know and then some. You have to cooperate and debrief immediately." My fellow citizens, something is rotten in our courtrooms. Either federal PDs are totally overloaded and outmatched or they are actively aiding the government's position at the macro level. No matter what the cause, the status quo is intolerable. Irrespective of Booker, make me, or Riverside bakery, it all amounts to nonsense.
And as I mentioned before, the culpability of good intentioned FPDs pales in comparison to the vile role federal prosecutors play in destroying the equal balance and root morality in the rule of law. I'll illustrate with only this: when you feel that it is viable legal strategy to indict a person's 70 year-old grandmother for some minor nuance in the conspiracy statute, like answering a phone, and you know good and well she was not a real conspirator in the common usage of the word, and you do it for the sole purpose of extracting a guilty plea because you're not absolutely positive the relevant facts of the case are good enough to meet your conviction percentage (often 90+%)--than you are a sympathizer to monsters and thugs every bit as evil as their manufactured perception of the person they happen to be prosecuting. If grandma goes away for two years (possibly for her a life sentence) the thug just shakes his or her head and laments, "it didn't have to be that way; the defendant made me do it by taking the case to trial," and goes about his or her merry way to case number 2000.
For the vast majority of defendants who refuse to cooperate or are actually innocent, this is the tragic status quo, as we'll see in case number 2001.
A farmer is victimized by the government because his neighbor was growing 401 marijuana plants on the fringes of his 500 acre farm. The DEA finds them, comes to his door, and says "we will go away if you just tell us the truth. Be honest, you had to have some idea there could be marijuana plants out there. After all, it is your land, right?" The unsuspecting farmer tells the truth, "Look, I heard that John over there was maybe growing the stuff on his land but that doesn't have anything to do with me." Bingo. That's enough to probably get him indicted. It's now time to testify against John or else. But the farmer is reluctant to testify to things he's not really sure about; maybe John's a life long friend and neighbor, or even worse maybe he's a motorcycle gang lord with plenty of friends. Of course the ramifications for refusing to testify will be extreme: his farm will be seized, he'll spend all his money on legal fees, and he'll probably be convicted and receive a ten-year prison sentence.
And it gets worse.
John will be indicted as well. They'll say to him, "Look John, we know you grew the pot. Make it easy on yourself and confirm for us that the farmer knew the stuff was over there." John will ask what's in it for him to squeal. "Five years off your sentence. That's what." John's memory is really starting to come back now. "Yep, I think I did mention it to him on Tuesday April 6 at 4:32pm." Doesn't it only make sense that the more evil John (the informant) would tend to be (Hell's Angel) the more he'd be apt to lie to save his own skin?
As a result, not only does the farmer go to prison, but he gets a bunch more time than the guy who actually grew and was going to reap the financial reward of the crop! Why? Because the farmer refused or was unable to "play ball," and the evil John stepped right up to the plate. This is again the status quo of the federal system.
Shouldn't a defendant's sentence have a positive relationship to the degree of his culpability in the "crime." Isn't this only fair and just? But the success of a federal prosecution is based primarily on the length of sentences that are handed down AS A RESULT OF the investigation and prosecution. This is the status quo of US attorneys who view fairness as secondary to conviction rates and the length of sentences they can attain from them.
These are the practices that have come to define all U.S. Attorneys, regardless of the crimes they prosecute. What works for pot growers will work for abortion doctors and they hone their chops in anticipation with every case. Fortunately for our children, like all institutional disgraces in American history, these evil practices shall eventually be halted. And in the end historians will finally realize what is at this moment the absolute truth, that federal prosecutors who engage in these practices are the very epitome of the evil antagonists of great American protest novels like "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Grapes of Wrath." They are in the flesh the villains that all members of a self-aware society should be fighting against.
In present tense, we take solemn solace that at the very least Tom Joad will be there in the dark to haunt the midnight dreams of evil men. In the waking hours, however, troubled times await. Crony capitalists know that prison cells can't be built without prospective tenants, and as a result of Booker, focus groups have already begun to drudge up what political angle can best be taken to extract ten superfluous votes in the stae of Oklahoma. The culture war is real and raging and the benevolent right will fodderize at will from its media cannons.
Judges will sheepishly begin to mitigate extreme sentences. The Justice Department will howl at the moon because they no longer hold the sole legal right of pillage and plunder. Inevitably a borderline case will arise for seizing, to be locked and loaded for the chattering class to prop up and scorn. The resulting "outcry" will provide crony capitalists the perfect opportunity to redefine the drab language of "tort reform" into a "legal reform" mantra to be peppered and repeated by rabble-rousing right-wing populists until all further debate amounts to nothing more than a dessert offering after an already indigestible main course. And amidst the protracted wording of new legislation, the Washington gremlin will spit a few tasty lines that will cost daughters their fathers and husbands their wives. All smoke and mirrors for the real goal of slithering class-action lawsuits into federal court, where cheating corporations and murderous drug companies can hide behind conservative pro-business judges. In the end it won't be about sentencing fairness; it will be about money.
Our rescue from tyranny obviously requires the kind of real-world effort than no fictional character can possibly provide. I am not normally a cynical person but unless activists begin to recognize now that the Booker decision may just end in more heartache, not just, for disappeared in the federal government's current genocide on people, but for all who believe in the fairness of law.