Federal drug laws create a labeling problem. When you hear the term "drug trafficker," you might consider Pablo Escobar or Walter White, but the reality is that under federal law, drug traffickers consist of people who purchase pseudo-ephedrine for their methamphetamine dealership; act as intermediary in a series of little transactions; or perhaps pick up a suitcase for the incorrect buddy. Thanks to conspiracy laws, everyone on the totem pole can be based on the same extreme necessary minimum sentences.
To the men and women who prepared our federal drug laws in 1986, this might come as a surprise. According to Sen. Robert Byrd, cosponsor of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the factor to attach five- and ten-year necessary sentences to drug trafficking was to punish "the kingpins-- the masterminds who are actually running these operations", and the mid-level dealerships.
Fast forward twenty-five years. Today, almost everybody convicted of a federal drug criminal activity is founded guilty of "drug trafficking", which most of the time leads to a minimum of a five- or ten-year necessary prison sentence. That's a great deal of time in federal prison for many people who are minor parts of drug trade, the huge majority of whom are males and females of color.
This is the system that federal district Judge Mark Bennett sees every day. Judge Bennett rests on the district court in northern Iowa, and he handles a great deal of drug cases. "Never might I have envisioned," he writes in a current piece in The Nation, "that ... after nineteen years [as a federal district court judge], I would have sent out 1,092 of my fellow citizens to federal prison for compulsory minimum sentences ranging from sixty months to life without the possibility of release. Most of these ladies, men and young people are nonviolent drug user." What about the kingpins? "I can count them on one hand," he states.
The numbers can't communicate the absurd catastrophe of it all. This is how he explains 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, indicating their role amounted to routinely purchasing and delivering cold medication to meth cookers in exchange for extremely little, low-grade quantities to feed their extreme addictions. All of them dealt with mandatory minimum sentences of sixty or 120 months.
There is data to recommend that Judge Bennett's experience is not uncharacteristic. In 2007, the U.S. Sentencing Commission assembled substantial data on drug and crack sentencing. They found that in 2005, most of the lowest-level drug- and crack-trafficking accused-- males and females described as "street-level dealers", "couriers/mules", and "renter/loader/lookout/ enabler/users"-- got 5- or ten-year obligatory jail sentences. This is especially true for crack-cocaine offenders, most of whom are black; despite the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, offering a small quantity of fracture cocaine (28 grams) carries the exact same mandatory minimum sentence-- five years-- as selling 500 grams of powder drug.
This is the truth for which supporters of severe federal drug laws should account. We can not pretend that heavy sentences for ladies like Kemba Smith and males like Jamel Dossie are the fluke mistakes of overboard laws. We must admit that our sentencing of small participants in the drug trade to prison terms meant for the leaders of large drug organizations-- as a typical event, not as an exception. As a result, we needlessly lock up great deals of small transgressors for long periods. Judge Bennett decries the human costs of these sentences:
If prolonged mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug user really worked, one might be able to justify them. However there is no evidence that they do. I have actually seen how they leave hundreds of countless children parent-less and thousands of aging, infirm and passing away parents childless. They ruin families and mightily fuel the cycle of hardship and dependency.
Here, again, we have evidence that Judge Bennett is right: long mandatory sentences are unnecessary for most drug offenders. In 2002 and 2003, Michigan and New York repealed obligatory sentences for drug culprits and provided judges www.criminallawyerslasvegas.com/drug-conspiracy-defense-las-vegas/ the power to impose shorter sentences, probation, or drug treatment.
For decades, Judge Bennett has actually seen a system that doesn't make sense. He has seen necessary laws written for the most serious, large-scale drug dealers applied to the men and women on the most affordable rungs of the drug trade, and he has seen it happen a lot. We when imagined that extreme mandatory sentences would be used to handle the leaders of big drug operations. It's time our federal drug laws were fit to individuals that they actually target.
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