The goal of mandatory minimum sentencing legislation is safety. There are certain crimes which, as a society, we have been conditioned to consider so heinous as to warrant completely removing discretion from the judge sentencing the defendant in order to impose an arbitrary floor of time spent incarcerated. Simply put, we want to keep bad people off the streets.
However, like so many high-minded attempts to reform the criminal justice sector, the actual results of these laws almost exclusively mandate excessively harsh penalties for people who do not deserve an extended jail sentence and who would have merited the benefits of leniency had a judge’s hands not been tied.
Paul Townsend, partner at Robert C. Gottlieb & Associates. Courtesy Photo.
