Several well-meaning laws lack common sense, resulting in inflexible, harsh penalties.
That is the conclusion reached by Jonathan Blanks in the Post Everything website of The Washington Post newspaper.
Some broad statutes have created “a system that can’t distinguish grown men from schoolchildren, serial rapists from amorous teens or drug mules from kingpins. Such a system is dysfunctional —stupid even,” wrote Blanks in his June 25 article titled America’s Stupidest Criminal Laws.
For example, some Drug-Free School Zone laws punish selling, manufacturing and sometimes just possessing illicit drugs within a specified distance of a school, park or daycare center with a higher punishment for the underlying drug offense.
Many black and Hispanic neighborhoods with high populations have overlapping zones, negating any deterrent effect and slanting enforcement against minority communities, Blanks noted. Heavy penalties are applied whether or not kids are involved and even if school is out for the summer.
Sex offender registries can include someone convicted of public urination or a 17- or 18-year-old who had consensual sex with a 15- or 16-year-old girlfriend or boyfriend. Thereby, hard line laws against child predators could bar the wrong people from certain areas, he pointed out.
The war on drugs was supposedly meant to give harsher mandatory minimum sentences to kingpins. However, the writer says they were used mostly on low-level dealers and “mules.”
“Until the 1800s, juries not only determined facts of laws — that is, whether the law was broken — but whether the law in question was just in the first place,” wrote Blanks. The Fourth Amendments of the Bill of Rights provide rights during criminal investigations.
Those protections have eroded over time, Blanks wrote. However, change is starting to come. State and federal lawmakers are recognizing that such policies can get awfully expensive.
Many states have amended their Drug-Free School Zone laws. Some reduced the penalty; others require the offense to be “at least tangentially tied to exposing children to the drug trade.” Still others have lowered the law’s geographical reach, according to the Sentencing Project, wrote Blanks.
The Smarter Sentencing Act would reduce some mandatory minimum penalties for non-violent drug offenders, if passed into law. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., proposed the act in the U.S. Senate.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission is also considering if recent sentence reductions for all non-violent drug offenses should apply retroactively to all applicable federal inmates. More than 50,000 may be eligible, which could save hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Throwing the book at offenders with well-meant but misguided lawmaking has wreaked havoc on correctional budgets while breaking up families and damaging local economies in the process,” wrote Blanks.
He urges policymakers let judges decide who is punished and how severely, instead of blind punishment. Such a system could lead to fewer mistakes than subjecting everyone to the inflexible categorical judgment of legislators and prosecutors, concluded Blanks.
