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Stephanie George — twenty-three, single mother, addicted to drugs. She made the mistake
of letting her boyfriend store some drugs in her home in a lockbox. She got life without
parole. Dicky Joe Jackson — twenty-seven and a father
of three. One of his kids was sick and needed a life-saving bone marrow transplant. At first
he tried fundraising money to get it. But he wasn't successful. So he made the mistake
of selling methamphetamine in order to pay for the operation. He received a life sentence
for it. Robert Riley — like so many others, he started
experimenting with marijuana at a young age. He got busted twice for it. Later in life,
at forty, he was arrested for selling LSD. He was sentenced to die in jail.
In most of these cases, the judges themselves say they wish they didn't have to impose the
sentence. Take the case of Weldon Angelos, a twenty-five-year old record producer. He
was convicted of selling marijuana a couple of times to an informant who claimed that
he had a gun. He received more than twice as much time as he would have if he had hijacked
an airplane, detonated a bomb in public, or even if he was a second-degree murderer.
Weldon Angelos is going to be eighty by the time he gets out of jail. He has kids, Can
you believe that? More time than a murderer for selling marijuana? The sentencing judge
himself said he thought it was cruel, unjust, and even irrational to give this man that
much time. But the law required him to do it.
Stop and think about that. The judges themselves, in court, while they are delivering the sentence,
are saying they think it's unfair. But they're required to do it by law. Pretty crazy, right?
I'm Alex Kreit, criminal law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. You're probably
asking yourself, how do we get to a place where judges can't judge? Where nonviolent,
low-level drug offenders are getting longer sentences than many rapists and murderers?
The answer is one of the most terrifying aspects of our War on Drugs: mandatory minimum sentencing.
Remember those three words. So here's how it works. Think about a drug
organization. You've got the guy at the top, the kingpin, the one making all the money.
Maybe he's a violent guy, a known murderer — the one the laws were supposedly designed
to punish. Then you've got all the people below him — the drivers, the couriers, a
kid who's selling drugs after school, even the girlfriend of the kingpin, as she takes
a couple voicemails, or lets him sell drugs at her house.
Under the law, all of these people are considered conspirators. Now you might think, surely
they'll each receive a different sentence. The kingpin's going to be punished more than
the people below him. But what I'm saying is, the mandatory sentencing
laws treat them all the same. They're sentenced not based on the role that they played in
the offense, but just on the types and quantity of drugs involved. And that right there is
just plain wrong. And it needs to end. And that's where you come in. Click here to
watch my next video. Or click here to get involved in ending one of the craziest of
our broken criminal-justice system. There's no better time than now. The momentum is building.
* * * So, remember that guy Weldon Angelos? The
guy who had the fifty-years for selling marijuana a couple of times? The same day he was sentenced,
in the same courtroom, there was somebody else, a defendant who had killed somebody
— beaten them to death. The judge, following the law, gave that person
twenty-two years. Twenty-two years for killing somebody versus fifty-five years for selling
marijuana a couple of times. This is how mandatory minimums distort the punishment.
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