A front page Intelligencer Journal New Era article “Treat burglars harshly, Lancaster County DA” reports:
“There are no set mandatory sentences, as there are with certain drug crimes and sex-abuse offenses.
“’We have mandatories for drug dealers, but not for criminals who break into our homes in the middle of the night?’ he said. ‘These victims don’t feel safe in their homes anymore. It takes away people’s peace of mind — and nothing can bring that back.’”
There is a big difference between Sentencing Guidelines, which exist, and the proposed Mandatory Minimums. The Guidelines are recommendations but not absolute constraints on a judge, although judges who regularly ignore guidelines are going to be subject to criticism and conceivably discipline. Mandatory Minimums deprives judges of their ability to use judgment in determining the harshness of a sentence.
That the Supreme Court ever allowed Mandatory Minimums seems like an affront to the Constitutional concept of separation of the Judicial System, the Executive Branch, and Congress. But they did.
This vile concept has caused young people who might have been caught with illegal drugs (no more dangerous than alcohol) to spend many years, often a decade, in prison and come out without skills, caring families and often as hardened criminals. Some judges have either refused to adjudicate drug cases or have even resigned from the bench rather than continue to impose draconian penalties where obvious leniency would have been in the better interest of society.
The article further reports the perspective of a judge:
“ ‘First-timers caught breaking into an occupied home face a 1-to-2-year state prison sentence under current guidelines.
” ‘A state sentence for a first-time offender, that’s pretty stiff if you ask me,” Lancaster County Judge Dennis Reinaker said. ‘Most of those first-time defendants are young and did something stupid without any thought of the consequences. I think they fall into the category of people whom we should be trying to rehabilitate.’ ”
Let Stedman do his job as a prosecutor and let judges do theirs in applying guidelines and discretion. If Stedman doesn’t like a particular decision, he can always howl to the media. That’s how democracy works.
As far as Steadman is concerned, the only direction that exists puts him onto the bench and he is happy to do ANYTHING that he feels keeps him moving in hat direction.