From the same thought processes that brought you the death penalty...
Quote of note:
Fairness aside, do we really want to spend $1.3 million to keep someone like Angelos locked up for the rest of his life?
Cruel, but Not That Unusual
November 19, 2004
A 25-year-old Utah man sold eight-ounce bags of marijuana on three occasions to an undercover officer. This week he was sentenced to 55 years in prison because he had a pistol strapped to his ankle during the deals.
That's more time than he would have received if he had hijacked a plane, beaten someone to death in a fight, detonated a bomb in an aircraft and provided weapons to support a foreign terrorist organization. The maximum sentence for all those crimes together is less than the mandatory minimum under federal sentencing rules for a small-time dope dealer carrying a gun. Those federal rules make California's three-strikes law — recently upheld by voters — look mild.
Weldon Angelos had no criminal record and never brandished the gun or threatened anyone. But although federal sentencing guidelines — which allow for judicial flexibility — recommend 10 years for a crime like his, a separate statute, more recently enacted, sets tougher mandatory minimums for drug felonies involving guns.
At Angelos' sentencing in Salt Lake City, U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell decried the required 55-year term as so "unjust, cruel and even irrational" that he has appealed to President Bush to commute the sentence and to Congress to modify the law so that its harshest provisions "apply only to true recidivist drug offenders."
