On November 16, Utah Judge Paul G. Cassell gave a 22-year sentence to a
murderer who beat an elderly woman to death with a log.
Two hours later, he sentenced nonviolent, first-time-offender Weldon
Angelos, age 24, to 55 years and a day in essence, a life sentence.
Weldon’s crime? Selling a small amount of marijuana to a Utah
undercover policeman.
How was this possible? It was yet another horror story created by
America’s savage mandatory minimum sentencing laws, imposed by Congress
during the “get tough on drugs” mania that seized Congress in the 1980s.
Angelos wore a small pistol in an ankle holster when he sold the
marijuana. Although he didn’t use, threaten to use, or brandish the weapon,
that triggered the federal mandatory minimum laws, and sent his sentence
skyrocketing.
Angelos’ mandatory 55 years is based on three firearms-related charges:
for carrying a gun during two drug sales and for keeping additional
firearms at his apartment. Federal law require a five-year
mandatory-minimum sentence for the first charge and a 25-year term for each count
thereafter.
Under federal law, Judge Cassell had no choice but to impose the 55
years.
Cassell is no softie on crime. He’s a Bush appointee, former
prosecutor, and death penalty advocate.
But he was horrified by what the law forced him to do to Weldon
Angelos. So horrified, in fact, that he wrote a 67-page memorandum denouncing
the mandatory sentencing and asking Bush to commute the sentence to a
more reasonable (in his mind) 18 years.
Under federal law, Judge Cassell noted, an airplane hijacker would get
24 years. A bomb-detonating terrorist would get a 19-year sentence. A
three-time child rapist would get 15 years.
"Is there a rational basis for giving Mr. Angelos more time than the
hijacker, the murderer, the rapist?" Judge Cassell wrote. “To sentence
Mr. Angelos to prison for the rest of his life is unjust, cruel, and even
irrational."
From The Liberator Online.
