Punishment, CitizenStyle

AVERAGE CITIZENS WOULD not sentence drug criminals based on the
substances they sold, but on the risk they posed to others in commission
of their crimes, according to a national survey by the U.S. Sentencing
Commission.

More than 1,700 people were polled in the Sentencing Commission's
firstever attempt to assess public attitudes on federal sentences and
to gauge how they compare to the guidelines established under the
Sentencing Reform Act of 1984.

The law took much of a federal judge's sentencing discretion away in
order to minimize sentencing disparities.

Those guidelines, designed to assure more uniform sentencing for federal
offenses across the country, set prison terms for drug offenders based
on the type of drug sold, the role a defendant played in a crime and the
amount of drugs involved in the case.

But the general public appears to care little about such distinctions
when it considers prison time for drug crime, according to the
Sentencing Commission survey.

For any illegal drug trafficking offensecrack, powder cocaine or
herointhe median sentence favored by those surveyed was 10 years.

The sentencing guidelines, however, treat trafficking in crack as a much
more serious crime, dictating a median sentence of 22 years for crack
compared to 9.1 for cocaine or heroin.

The survey showed that the general public would deal much more harshly
with legal drug manufacturers who break the law than the sentencing
guidelines dictate.

Drug company officials who concealed the bad side effects of a drug or
marketed the drug after false testing should receive a median sentence
of 5 years according to the public opinion survey, but such defendants
would receive only a median 1.8year prison term under the guidelines.

This difference in treatment of drug offenders was the greatest
disparity between public opinion and the law that was tracked by the
sociologists who conducted the survey for the Sentencing Commission,
Peter H. Rossi, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and
Richard A. Berk, of the University of California at Los Angeles.

The professors preferred to make comparisons by medians rather than
averages, which they said were skewed somewhat because of a few
respondents who gave uniformly high or low sentences to everyone.

Professors Rossi and Berk remarked on how close many of the public
opinion responses were to the actual sentencing guidelines; both the
public and the guideline median sentences for kidnappers who kill their
victims was 39.2 years.

And public opinion is roughly in line with the guidelines in treating
possession of marijuana as the least serious offense.

MARIANNE LAVELLE