HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ 1/HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ.iso/drugs/justice.mocked

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 5.1 KB | 101 lines

Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 93 17:26 PDT
From: [e-mail] (pbray)
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Mandatory Min. Drug Sentences - Article

Justice Mocked; The farce of mandatory minimum sentences.

By Colman McCarthy

A year ago Patricia Martorana, a 20-year-old woman I came to know and
admire when she had been a gifted student leader at Vero Beach (Fla.)
High School, was attending Valencia Community College in Orlando. She
waited tables to earn tuition money. Her career plans included earning a
degree to work for the Florida forestry department as a wildlife
conservationist.

Today Martorana is caged in a federal prison in Marianna, Fla. She is
three months into a two-year sentence after plea bargaining to a charge
of conspiracy to distribute LSD.

I doubt if any member of Congress had Patricia Martorana or citizens
like her in mind when the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed.
Amendments that were a pitched response to get tough on drug offenders
set mandatory minimum sentences. Judges were left with no sentencing
options. The congressional intent was to cast a judicial net so wide and
tight that, at last, drug lords and kingpins would be snared and given
the stiff punishment they deserved. And members of Congress could
champion themselves as winning the war on drugs.

They're winning all right - small. Patricia Martorana, whose case is not
unusual, according to legislative and judicial groups that monitor the
effects of mandatory minimums, was a nonviolent first offender. She did
not deal, buy, sell or use drugs. Her "conspiracy" to distribute LSD, as
detailed in the plea agreement with a federal prosecutor, was marginal
and fleeting at best.

Last May, Martorana was phoned at home by an undercover agent posing as
a buyer. He had been given her number by a high school friend of
Martorana. The agent, along with a government informant who was
cooperating to have time cut from his sentence from an earlier drug
crime, was directed by Martorana to someone she knew at work who was a
dealer. The agent paid him $1,340 for 1,000 dosage units of LSD.

Martorana was given $100 as a commission by her co-worker. In a stakeout
of the young woman's apartment, surveillance agents learned it was there
that the dealer transferred the LSD to Martorana's high school friend,
who then sold it to the undercover agent outside.

For this role in a relatively minor drug deal set up by legal
entrapment, and in a state teeming with violent and huge drug rings, a
young college student is now a federal prisoner. When Martorana was
sentenced in early November, a family member recalls, the judge
expressed a sentiment of frustration routinely heard from the bench: the
mandatory minimum sentencing law gave him no choice but imprisoning the
student for two years. He was forbidden to consider that this was a
nonviolent first offense or that Martorana's participation was small or
that her mother recently died of cancer and her father is disabled.
Probation, community service or counseling was out.

On Feb. 17, Rep. Don Edwards (D-Calif.) introduced legislation calling
for an end to mandatory minimums. He was responding to the increasing
opposition to the restriction from the American Bar Association, judges
in all 12 judicial circuits and the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Occasionally a jurist can no longer take it. In late 1990, a
Reagan-appointed federal judge in San Diego resigned because of
mandatory minimums: "They have destroyed the discretion of judges," J.
Lawrence Irving said. "They are grossly unfair to the litigants. For the
most part the sentences are excessive, particularly for first-time
offenders."

It works the other way, too, as in "guideline sentences." This is a
process by which drug kingpins can bargain for lower sentences if they
cooperate with prosecutors by fingering others in the ring. A mandatory
sentence can be avoided by naming names. "The moral of this story," says
Julie Stewart, director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a
Washington advocacy group, "is that if you're going to get caught on a
drug charge, be a kingpin. You can talk and get off lightly. It also
means that those who have little or no information to bargain with get
the hardest hit. They're the least guilty."

FAMM's files bulge with cases of citizens serving drug sentences of 5,
10 and 20 years without parole chances for first and often minor
offenses.

Inside her Florida prison, Patricia Martorana sees the injustice up
close: "There are women here serving 10 to 15 years on charges of drug
conspiracy. They are doing more time than some murderers. I would say
that over 50 percent of the women here are first offenders."

All are doing hard time, compliments of a simplistic law passed -  and
kept on the books - by an unthinking Congress. In addition to
brutalizing the lives of people like Patricia Martorana, justice itself
is mocked. Forced to obey mandatory minimums, judges can't judge. They
can only process, stamping defendants as they pass by like slabs of meat
on a judicial conveyor belt. If the 1986 law has had a measurable effect
on drug deals, it's news to the judges.