EXAMINING MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCING

Re: "One-size-fits-all justice," July 21 Perspective stories.

Mandatory minimum sentencing laws take discretion away from judges and
money away from the state.

These flawed statutes require judges to hand down sentences as if using a
graph, plugging in the crime on one axis and matching it with a punishment
on theother.

The legal process is the act of weighing and balancing circumstances, not
of always abiding by a fixed standard. Judicial deliberation, not
equations, should determine proper punishment. It's no accident that the
symbol for justice is a scale.

Mandatory minimum sentencing statutes reduce the criminal-justice process
to an equation.

But the real equation looks something like this: Mandatory minimums equal
less judicial prudence, and more people in jail for more time; more
prisoners equals more state money spent on prisons and less state money
spent on education, transportation, health care and so on.

I am the co-chair of a legislative interim subcommittee that is examining
mandatory minimum sentences and disparities in sentencing. We will meet
several times between now and next January's regular legislative session.

Hopefully, our efforts will produce a method that gives judges more freedom
to exercise measured, not mechanical, justice while costing the state less
money.

State Rep. PETER GROFF Denver