paulitician
Platinum Member
- Oct 7, 2011
- 38,401
- 4,162
- 1,130
'Half the prison population is nonviolent drug offenders'
Sharanda Jones never considered herself a criminal mastermind. Her job was just buying the cocaine powder; other members of the organization rendered it into crack cocaine and sold it. Jones owned a gun — for self-protection — but never used it.
And yet Jones, a nonviolent drug purchaser, is serving life without parole — at a cost to the taxpayers of over a million dollars.
“She was treated as a leader, and at the time she really believed that she was minimally involved and decided to go to trial,” said Molly Gill, government affairs counsel at Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a criminal justice advocacy organization. “When you do that … if you are a leader convicted, that’s considered perjury. All of those factors bumped her sentence up and up and up.”
At issue are federal laws that compel judges to impose harsh sentences on convicted defendants. Most cover nonviolent offenses and are largely drug related.
But thanks to a growing sense among people on all sides of the political spectrum that the law should change, Congress is poised to revisit mandatory minimums. It was recently announced that the Justice Safety Valve Act, a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, will get a Senate committee hearing in September.
If approved by Congress, the act would restore some measure of discretion to judges, allowing them to impose lighter sentences on nonviolent offenders when appropriate.
Mandatory minimums are an increasing concern for Conservatives. For one thing, the cost to incarcerate nonviolent offenders is simply too high...
Read more: Nonviolent offenders obeyed state laws, went to jail anyway | The Daily Caller
Sharanda Jones never considered herself a criminal mastermind. Her job was just buying the cocaine powder; other members of the organization rendered it into crack cocaine and sold it. Jones owned a gun — for self-protection — but never used it.
And yet Jones, a nonviolent drug purchaser, is serving life without parole — at a cost to the taxpayers of over a million dollars.
“She was treated as a leader, and at the time she really believed that she was minimally involved and decided to go to trial,” said Molly Gill, government affairs counsel at Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a criminal justice advocacy organization. “When you do that … if you are a leader convicted, that’s considered perjury. All of those factors bumped her sentence up and up and up.”
At issue are federal laws that compel judges to impose harsh sentences on convicted defendants. Most cover nonviolent offenses and are largely drug related.
But thanks to a growing sense among people on all sides of the political spectrum that the law should change, Congress is poised to revisit mandatory minimums. It was recently announced that the Justice Safety Valve Act, a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, will get a Senate committee hearing in September.
If approved by Congress, the act would restore some measure of discretion to judges, allowing them to impose lighter sentences on nonviolent offenders when appropriate.
Mandatory minimums are an increasing concern for Conservatives. For one thing, the cost to incarcerate nonviolent offenders is simply too high...
Read more: Nonviolent offenders obeyed state laws, went to jail anyway | The Daily Caller
Last edited:
