Mandatory Minimums: Fair or Foul?

By Harriet Ryan - Courttv.com

When Kellie Mann was a college student in Northern California, her ex-boyfriend dared her to buy some LSD for him. She hadn’t used drugs since the end of their relationship nearly two years before, but she went to a Grateful Dead concert, bought 30 sheets, and mailed them to his Georgia home.

The ex, a drug dealer and user, got caught. He turned Mann and several others in and in exchange, received less than three years in prison. Mann, then a 20-year-old with no criminal record, confessed her role and got 10 years.

For the anthropology student with a B average, it was a stinging lesson in federal mandatory minimum drug statutes, laws that give judges no discretion in sentencing certain offenders. There would be no parole for her, she was told, nor early release for good behavior. She was to serve all 10 years, spending her 20s in a federal prison.

Mann is hardly the type of drug kingpin the public imagined when Congress passed popular mandatory minimums laws 15 years ago, but in the intervening years, she and other offenders whose sentences seem to defy common sense have become poster children for changing the statutes or eliminating them all together.

Federal prosecutors maintain that harsh prison time is appropriate given the toll drugs take on society and say mandatory minimums are crucial tools for breaking the fear and loyalty that bind drug syndicates. But critics, including federal judges, have complained that the laws have succeeded only in filling prisons with nonviolent first-time offenders serving sentences ridiculously out of proportion to their crime.

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