MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES ARE WRONG RESPONSE TO KILLINGS

With a paroled drug dealer in custody for the slashing deaths of his ex-wife
and two of her children, some legislators appear ready to call for a return
to mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders.

That won't serve justice or the taxpayers. Nor will it guarantee that some
parolee in the future will not commit an equally horrific crime.

A bipartisan Legislature repealed mandatory minimums for drug offenses last
year. Former Gov. John Engler signed the bill, sponsored by Rep. Bill
McConico, D-Detroit. So far, 461 inmates have been released under the law.

Mandatory minimums were a failure on all counts. They drove up prison costs,
took from judges the same discretion they have when sentencing violent
criminals, and failed to get drug kingpins off the streets.

The new law allowed the primary suspect in Sunday's murders in Pontiac,
Daniel Franklin, to be paroled about three year before he would have been
released under the old standards. Franklin was a low-level drug offender who
wasn't serving time for an assaultive offense.

Two things should be noted with regard to his release. First, neither the
parole board nor the police were aware of the threatening letters Franklin
had written to his ex-wife, as they should have been. If they were, Franklin
probably would not have been paroled. Second, human behavior is not a
science. More than 10,000 inmates a year are paroled in Michigan, and only
12 percent commit another crime. But there's no guarantee, even under the
harshest sentencing guidelines, that someone leaving prison will not do
something to return.

Michigan's mandatory minimum sentencing laws were costly and ineffective. It
would be easy but wrongheaded to use this tragedy to revive them.