La loi aux USA

Des fois qu'il y en ai qui sache lire l'anglais...
Comme quoi on est pas plus mal en France...

On November 16 (2005 NDLR), 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."

A respected and growing body of individuals and organizations, from across the political spectrum, oppose mandatory sentencing laws. A few:

* U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist
* Former attorney general Edwin Meese
* Former FBI director Louis Freeh
* Former drug czar Barry McCaffrey
* The American Bar Association
* The National Association of Veteran Police Officers
* The National Council of La Raza
* The American Psychological Association
* The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
* The Federal Courts Study Committee
* The American Civil Liberties Union
* The U.S. Sentencing Commission
* Each of the 11 Federal Judicial Circuits

The Angelos case is bringing some well-deserved attention to the horrors and injustice of these barbaric laws.

But a libertarian analysis of the case goes much further than that. Two simple questions: Why should it be a crime to sell marijuana in the first place? And why should it be illegal to exercise your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms while engaged in peaceful, consensual commercial activities?