Ringing chastisement of mandatory prison sentences for nonviolent crimes from the federal bench may have become a new – and welcome -- Nebraska tradition.
Members of Congress should pay heed. Only they can rectify this situation; they created it.
The United States has about five percent of the world’s population. But about 20 percent of the people in prison around the world are behind bars in America. Overly harsh sentences required under federal law are the major reason why.
Recently U.S. District Judge John Gerrard recently told a recovering meth user that the 10-year sentence he was required to impose was "ridiculous." It didn’t fit the crime.
“The only reason I’m imposing the sentence I am imposing today is because I have to,” Gerrard said. “That’s what Congress mandates."
Last June Gerrard told another recovering meth user and mother of two that she was a poster child for the unfairness of mandatory 10-year sentences.
In both cases Gerrard said that a short prison sentence would have been appropriate, but not one that lasted an entire decade.
Gerrard’s castigation of the federal sentencing requirements echoed that delivered back in the 1990s by U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf of Omaha, who railed against the longer sentences mandated by Congress for cocaine that was in the form of crack instead of power. Quoting a line from “Oliver Twist,” Kopf said, “In this case the law is an ass.”
Congress reduced the disparity on sentences for the two forms of cocaine in 2010, but more reform is needed.
It shouldn’t be this hard.
There is bipartisan support for reducing the mandatory minimum sentences. The high-profile conservative Charles G. Koch wrote in an op-ed column published in the Sunday Journal Star that “families and entire communities are being ripped apart by laws that unjustly destroy the lives of low-level and nonviolent offenders.”
To some fanfare the bipartisan Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 was unveiled last year by Sen. Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, a Republican, and Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat. A similar bill is pending in the House.
At the time there was optimism that the bill would make it through Congress. It was voted out of committee in October.
Now its prospects seem uncertain, as Congress has become more preoccupied with the upcoming election.
One would think the Republican-controlled legislative chambers would have plenty of time on their hands to approve worthwhile legislation, given Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s determination to not even allow hearings or a vote on any U.S. Supreme Court nominee named by President Barack Obama.
The descriptions that sitting federal judges have given to mandatory sentences for nonviolent crimes are appropriate. As long as federal lawmakers continue to dither on reform, the adjectives apply equally as well to Congress.
