NEW YORK TIMES: ….Judge John Gleeson is not shy about meting out tough sentences. “Most people, including me,” he wrote in a 2010 decision, “agree that the kingpins, masterminds and midlevel managers of drug trafficking enterprises deserve severe punishment.”
But he has lately been saying that his old employer, the Department of Justice, has stopped living up to its name when it comes to some small-time criminals…
The prosecutors’ decision to invoke the law calling for a mandatory sentence in Mr. Dossie’s case meant that Judge Gleeson had no choice but to send Mr. Dossie away for five years. Had his hands not been tied, Judge Gleeson wrote, “there is no way I would have sentenced” Mr. Dossie to so long a sentence… (more)
EDITOR: This is nothing new. The federal, state and regional judiciaries have been pleading with the Department of Justice to reform mandatory minimum sentencing for well over three decades. No less a representative than the chair of the Second District Court of Appeals, Judge Edward Becker (now deceased), twice intervened with the then attorney general on behalf of the federal judiciary, with no success.
Becker was a friend from childhood and a thoroughly decent individual. For his entire life he lived in the comfortable but modest house in which he was born , assisting his lovely and able wife Flora in raising a family. When I left his office the final time after a meeting concerning drug policy reform, the last words he said to me were “Robert, you are doing God’s work.” They meant a lot then and do now.
