This judge says he feels "guilt and sadness" when he sentences a nonviolent drug offender

German Lopez · Tuesday, June 09, 2015, 1:55 pm
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When US District Judge Mark Bennett hands down a harsh prison sentence for drug crimes, he doesn't give a lecture on the harms drugs do to the community. He instead apologizes, saying, "My hands are tied on your sentence. I'm sorry. This isn't up to me."
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In a new story by the Washington Post's Eli Saslow, Bennett criticizes the impact of harsh mandatory minimum sentences established in the 1980s, which can require judges to imprison drug offenders — even nonviolent ones — for decades at a time.
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Although Bennett has locked up genuinely violent criminals in the past, much of his work has focused — despite his protest and feelings of "guilt and sadness" — on more than 1,100 nonviolent offenders, the Post found:
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And now it was another Tuesday in Sioux City[, Iowa] — five hearings listed on his docket, five more nonviolent offenders whose cases involved mandatory minimums of anywhere from five to 20 years without the possibility of release. Here in the methamphetamine corridor of middle America, Bennett averaged seven times as many cases each year as a federal judge in New York City or Washington. He had sentenced two convicted murderers to death and several drug cartel bosses to life in prison, but many of his defendants were addicts who had become middling dealers, people who sometimes sounded to him less like perpetrators than victims in the case reports now piled high on his bench. "History of family addiction." "Mild mental retardation." "PTSD after suffering multiple rapes." "Victim of sexual abuse." "Temporarily homeless." "Heavy user since age 14."
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This work has troubled Bennett so much that he now travels to prisons around the country to visit people he has sentenced, offering them answers to their legal questions and help getting them to drug treatment classes. In court, he often makes remarks like, "Congress has tied my hands," and, "I have to uphold the law whether I agree with it or not."
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Bennett isn't the first judge to share this kind of sentiment. Paul Cassell, a retired judge from Utah, earlier this year lamented the 55-year sentence he handed down to Weldon Angelos for selling marijuana while in possession of a firearm. "I do think about Angelos," Cassell told ABC News. "I sometimes drive on the interstate by the prison where he's held, and I think, 'That wasn't the right thing to do, and the system forced me to do it.'"
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http://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8752881/drugs-mandatory-minimum-sentences