Federal drug laws develop a labeling issue. When you hear the term "drug trafficker," you may think of Pablo Escobar or Walter White, however the truth is that under federal law, drug traffickers include individuals who purchase pseudo-ephedrine for their methamphetamine dealer; function as middleman in a series of small deals; and even pick up a travel suitcase for the wrong good friend. Thanks to conspiracy laws, everybody on the totem pole can be subject to the very same serious obligatory minimum sentences.
To the men and females who prepared our federal drug laws in 1986, this may come as a surprise. According to Sen. Robert Byrd, cosponsor of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the factor to connect five- and ten-year compulsory sentences to drug trafficking was to penalize "the kingpins-- the masterminds who are really running these operations", and the mid-level dealerships.
Fast forward twenty-five years. Today, practically everybody founded guilty of a federal drug criminal offense is founded guilty of "drug trafficking", which typically results in a minimum of a 5- or ten-year mandatory jail sentence. That's a lot of time in federal prison for lots of people who are minor parts of drug trade, the vast bulk of whom are men and women of color.
This is the system that federal district Judge Mark Bennett sees every day. Judge Bennett sits on the district court in northern Iowa, and he manages a lot of drug cases. "Never ever could I have actually imagined," he writes in a current piece in The Country, "that ... after nineteen years [as a federal district court judge], I would have sent 1,092 of my fellow citizens to federal jail for obligatory minimum sentences varying from sixty months to life without the possibility of release. The majority of these women, guys and young adults are nonviolent addict." What about the kingpins? "I can count them on one hand," he says.
The numbers can't convey the ridiculous catastrophe of it all. This is how he describes a recent drug trafficking case:
I just recently sentenced a group of more than twenty defendants on meth trafficking conspiracy charges. Eighteen were 'tablet smurfers,' as federal prosecutors put it, suggesting their role amounted to frequently buying and providing cold medicine to meth cookers in exchange for very small, low-grade amounts to feed their extreme addictions. All of them dealt with obligatory minimum sentences of sixty or 120 months.
There is data to suggest that Judge Bennett's experience is not uncharacteristic. In 2007, the U.S. Sentencing Commission assembled substantial data on drug and fracture sentencing. They discovered that in 2005, most of the lowest-level cocaine- and crack-trafficking accused-- males and females referred to as "street-level dealers", "couriers/mules", and "renter/loader/lookout/ enabler/users"-- received five- or ten-year compulsory jail sentences. This is particularly real for crack-cocaine offenders, most of whom are black; despite the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, offering a small quantity of crack cocaine (28 grams) brings the exact same obligatory minimum sentence-- five years-- as selling 500 grams of powder cocaine.
This is the truth for which proponents of serious federal drug laws should account. We need to confess that our sentencing of minor participants in the drug trade to prison terms indicated for the leaders of big drug organizations-- as a common incident, not as an exception.
If prolonged mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug addicts actually worked, one may be able to justify them. I have actually seen how they leave hundreds of thousands of young children parent less and thousands of aging, infirm and passing away moms and dads childless.
Here, once again, we have evidence that Judge Bennett is right: long obligatory sentences are unnecessary for a lot of drug offenders. In 2002 and 2003, Michigan and New York repealed compulsory sentences for drug transgressors and gave judges the power to impose much shorter sentences, probation, or drug treatment.
For years, Judge Bennett has actually seen a system that does not make good sense. He has actually seen compulsory laws written for the most serious, large-scale drug dealers applied to the men and women on the lowest rungs of the drug trade, and he has seen it occur a lot. We when imagined that serious necessary sentences would be utilized to handle the leaders of big drug operations. It's time our federal drug laws were fit to individuals that they actually target.
If you have been charged with a drug related offense and need qualified representation, contact us to discuss your www.criminallawyerslasvegas.com/drug-conspiracy-defense-las-vegas case.
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