Yay or Nay? Why?

I might be playing devil's advocate on both sides, because I've never really made up my mind on this one.

its one of those issues that are very difficult to have a stance on... because they do make sentances "fair" - a rich guy, a poor guy, a black guy, a white guy, etc all get at least the minimum.

on the flip side though, they are totally unneeded/useless, because if the court system/prosecutors want to play favorites, they just charge them with a similar crime.... like when a speeding ticket turns into "impeding traffic".

Well, provided that they get a "fair" shake before they get convicted.



Not sure what your'e getting at here.

If a well respected rich white senator gets caught pointing a loaded gun at a hooker, and the minimum sentance for pointing a gun at a hooker is 10 years.... so instead the prosecution charges him with something different like "unregistered weapon" or something, to avoid the minimum sentance..... it ends up rendering the "Mandatory Sentance" moot.

Ah, yo entiendo.

Won't that pretty much exist with or without them, however? Also, that process is very common as far as plea bargains go.

kinda my point. Mandatory sentances are great in theory, but pretty much useless because there are so many ways to circumvent them.

Well then let's take the example where the prosecution is certain they want to charge someone with a serious crime, and the jury unanimously convicts him/her. Then, for some reason, the judge decides to give a sentence that's drastically lower than what the statute suggests. This is where most of the complaints seem to be directed at.

I HATE mandatory minimums. I'd much rather have judge or jury of human beings who actually heard the case decide what is a fair sentence rather than someone with a sliderule in the legislature. I have no problem with "guidelines", but you can't handcuff the judge to be more lenient if he sees fit under the circumstances.

Death penalty instead of life sounds like a winner... in all cases.

Even with minimum sentences, don't inmates often get out sooner for one reason or another?

Yeah, but that's up to parole boards, and in most states they have to serve a certain percentage of their sentence before they are eleigible for parole, so the original sentence is still significant.

But what about jailbreaks

Nay.

On the flipside, what about handcuffing the judge/jury from being more harsh if they see fit under the circumstances?

Only a higher court can determine if a judge imposed a sentence that was "cruel and unusual" under the constitution. Again though, we'd have experienced jurists making these decisions, not politicians.

Well, then let's be sure that I understand this. If a statute says that a sentence for a certain crime can be no more than X amount of time, does the judge have the ability to sentence for greater time than X?

No.

But I don't think there should be ANY mandatory sentencing standards. It should be entirely up to the judge (or jury).

Alright, and I would agree that there should be some consistency on both ends. Practically, it seems at this point that mandatory maximums are more accepted than minimums, and I was curious as to why that's the case.

By the way, I think Eric's thread on the purpose of imprisonment dovetails nicely with this thread. There's a lot of people out there that don't understand how someone can get convicted of a heinous crime by a jury, but then the judge hands out a sentence that is more lenient than the guidelines, and some would consider an inadequate form of punishment.

we have a big problem with them in Georgia on a specific issue. High School aged boys and High school aged girls having sex, then the guy gets charged with statutory rape and thrown in jail for 10 years then has to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life all because he had sex with a girl who was a year or two his junior whether it was consentual or not. In all our cases in question, it was consensual.

If the man (or woman yeah right like this situation is equal) is 40 and molesting school kids fine but the judge would give them a harsh sentence anyway. The above is absolutely insane. We have at least two cases of this already and both boys are serving 10 year sentences after having consentual sex.


0 tolerance is essentially 0 thought. I think they are stupid. It takes reason out of the hands of the Judge and leads to situations like the above.

Public Schools do the same thing with thier Zero Tolerance policies, mainly because public school administrators on average are among the least intelligent people occupying the planet.