DrugPolicyCases.com | |||
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Sentencing and Penalties Judicial discretion and mandatory minimums, drug conspiracy penalties and double jeopardy - all of these can be found in this section. Pages: ‹1› ‹2› ‹3› ‹4› ‹5› ‹6› ‹7› ‹8› ‹9› ‹10› ‹11› ‹12› ‹13›
To be constitutionally proportionate, punishment must be tailored to a defendant's personal responsibility and moral guilt. See Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S., at 801. JUSTICE KENNEDY attempts to justify the harsh mandatory sentence imposed on petitioner by focusing on the subsidiary effects of drug use, and thereby ignores this aspect of our Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances. [...]
...[I]t is inconceivable that a State could rationally choose to penalize one who possesses large quantities of alcohol in a manner similar to that in which Michigan has chosen to punish petitioner for cocaine possession, because of the tangential effects which might ultimately be traced to the alcohol at issue. "Unfortunately, grave evils such as the narcotics traffic can too easily cause threats to our basic liberties by making attractive the adoption of constitutionally forbidden shortcuts that might suppress and blot out more quickly the unpopular and dangerous conduct." Turner v. United States, 396 U.S. 398, 427 (1970) (Black, J., dissenting). [...]
The severity of the sentence that Michigan has mandated for the crime of possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine, whether diluted or undiluted, does not place the sentence in the same category as capital punishment. [...] Nevertheless, a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole does share one important characteristic of a death sentence: The offender will never regain his freedom. Because such a sentence does not even purport to serve a rehabilitative function, the sentence must rest on a rational determination that the punished "criminal conduct is so atrocious that society's interest in deterrence and retribution wholly outweighs any considerations of reform or rehabilitation of the perpetrator." Serious as this defendant's crime was, I believe it is irrational to conclude that every similar offender is wholly incorrigible.
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The New Hampshire proportionality provision, by far the most detailed of the genre, read: "All penalties ought to be proportioned to the nature of the offence. No wise legislature will affix the same punishment to the crimes of theft, forgery and the like, which they do to those of murder and treason; where the same undistinguishing severity is exerted against all offenses; the people are led to forget the real distinction in the crimes themselves, and to commit the most flagrant with as little compunction as they do those of the lightest dye: For the same reason a multitude of sanguinary laws is both impolitic and unjust. The true design of all punishments being to reform, not to exterminate, mankind." N. H. Const., Art. I, § 18 (1784).
The Ohio provision copied that of New Hampshire. [...]
"No express restriction is laid in the constitution, upon the power of imprisoning for crimes. But, as it is forbidden to demand unreasonable bail, which merely exposes the individual concerned, to imprisonment in case he cannot procure it; as it is forbidden to impose unreasonable fines, on account of the difficulty the person fined would have of paying them, the default of which would be punished by imprisonment only, it would seem, that imprisonment for an unreasonable length of time, is also contrary to the spirit of the constitution. Thus in cases where the courts have a discretionary power to fine and imprison, shall it be supposed, that the power to fine is restrained, but the power to imprison is wholly unrestricted by it? In the absence of all express regulations on the subject, it would surely be absurd to imprison an individual for a term of years, for some in considerable offense, and consequently it would seem, that a law imposing so severe a punishment must be contrary to the intention of the framers of the constitution." B. Oliver, The Rights of an American Citizen 185-186 (1832).
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The Illinois General Assembly has decided that the possession of less than 2.5 grams of marijuana is a class C misdemeanor. See Ill. Comp. Stat., ch. 720, § 550/4(a) (1998). In so classifying the offense, the legislature made a concerted policy judgment that the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use does not constitute a particularly significant public policy concern. While it is true that this offense -- like feeding livestock on a public highway or offering a movie for rent without clearly displaying its rating -- may warrant a jail sentence of up to 30 days, the detection and prosecution of possessors of small quantities of this substance is by no means a law enforcement priority in the State of Illinois.
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