On Monday, August 12, the day Attorney General Eric Holder announced “a
fundamentally new approach” to the criminal justice system in his speech
before the American Bar Association in San Francisco, US District Court
Judge Mark W. Bennett was in his office in Sioux City, Iowa, drafting a
sentencing opinion in a drug case. An outspoken critic of mandatory
minimums [see “ Imposing Injustice,”
November 12, 2012], Bennett is known for writing unusual opinions that
criticize the sentences he must often hand down. “It’s about trying to
make the system fairer,” he says, “not just for the defendant in front
of you, but for others.”
The defendant in this case, a 37-year-old black man named Douglas Young,
had caught a rare break. He’d pleaded guilty to two charges involving
twenty-eight grams of crack cocaine—an amount sufficient to trigger two
five-year mandatory minimum sentences. But he had previously been
convicted on another crack charge, in Chicago, when he was just 20 years
old. This single offense, seventeen years ago, meant not only that
prosecutors could have doubled Young’s mandatory minimum sentence, but
also that he could have received a maximum sentence of life without
parole.
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