Cruel and Irrational

A 55-YEAR SENTENCE FOR SELLING A FEW JOINTS' WORTH?

If Weldon Angelos was a rapist three times over, he'd have been
sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to federal law.

If he'd kidnapped three people, including children, he'd have a 17
1/2-year sentence.

If he was convicted of murdering three people in the second degree,
he'd have faced a 20-year sentence.

And if he was a terrorist who'd managed to hijack a couple of planes,
he'd have had to serve almost 34 years.

As it is, Angelos is a 25-year-old music executive and father of two
young children who sold a couple of small packets of marijuana worth
$350 to an undercover police officer while carrying (but neither using
nor displaying) a gun. On Wednesday, he was sentenced to 55 years in
federal prison.

To call it cruel and unusual punishment would be one of justice's
cruelest understatements of the year. The sentence is closer to insane
than just. It parodies the very notion of fairness when far graver
offenses involving incalculably greater intent to harm are treated
more gingerly. Under state laws in the 50 states, the very same
offense Angelo committed would have been dealt a sentence no harsher
than nine years, and about five to seven years in Utah.

But the sentencing judge, who agreed that the punishment was "unjust,
cruel and even irrational" in a 67-page order, had no choice. He had
to comply with sentencing guidelines that reduce his role to a mere
calculator. Guidelines have been around for 20 years. They were
started with good intentions to make sentencing more uniform and less
prone to personal philosophies. But guidelines is all they were,
giving judges plenty of room for discretion.

Then came Tom Feeney.

Florida's former house speaker and now a member of the U.S. House of
Representatives last spring attached an amendment to a popular
anti-crime bill at the last minute that would severely restrict
judges' discretion to give defendants breaks at sentencing. And to
give the Justice Department authority to summon the sentencing records
of every federal judge while reporting all sentences that buck the
guidelines to the House and Senate. The amendment got even
conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist publicly angry. But it
became law. Sen. Edward Kennedy has introduced a bill to repeal it.

Angelos, meanwhile, had to contend with another hurriedly passed law
that skewed his sentence. It isn't the marijuana that piled up the
years of his sentence, but the fact that he was carrying a gun while
dealing. That law was passed in a single day -- no congressional
hearings, no reports, no weighing of evidence -- as an amendment to
the Gun Control Act of 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy
had just been gunned down. Congress wanted to do something decisive to
-- as the amendment's sponsor put it on the floor of the House of
Representatives -- "persuade the man tempted to commit a federal
felony to leave his gun at home." Controlling guns to control violence
is commendable. But it isn't guns alone that have unintended
consequences.

Laws do, too. In Angelos' case, the combination of mandatory
sentences, the Feeney amendment and unintended consequences will
result in a man spending the rest of his life in jail for a relatively
minor offense. The assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case
justified the sentence by saying that Angelos was a "purveyor of
poison" who would have been willing to kill other human beings had it
been necessary. But he didn't kill. He never unholstered his gun from
his ankle strap. And nothing he did remotely approaches the
seriousness of crimes punishable by lesser sentences. In fact, the
same judge, two hours before Angelos' sentencing, imposed a 22-year
sentence on a man who'd murdered an elderly woman with a log.

Finally, Angelos was dealing marijuana -- the least hazardous of all
illegal drugs, and one that has been legalized for medicinal uses in
several states, including Montana a few weeks ago. Without excusing
his drug-dealing, there were many more reasons for judicial restraint
and forbearance, in his case, than there were for drastic punishment.
Had federal judges retained such discretion, the case would have ended
in a minor sentence and little to no attention. But judicial
discretion has been replaced with the politics of the drug war and
tough-on-crime sloganeering, compliments of Feeney-like fanaticism.
Angelos' indefensible 55-year prison sentence is the result.