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The ACLU released a new
report this week examining the growing trend of judges
sentencing nonviolent offenders to life in prison without parole.
The ACLU found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the War on Drugs,
mandatory minimums, and “tough-on-crime” policies are to blame.

The report,
A Living Death: A Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenders,
profiles 110 of the 3,278 inmates currently serving their life
sentences for nonviolent crimes. Most of the offenders were
charged with crimes like possession of small amounts of drugs or
petty theft.

For instance, one inmate, Timothy Jackson, stole a $159 jacket,
which, combined with three other minor shoplifting charges, met the
threshold for Louisiana’s Four-Strikes law. Jackson received a
mandatory sentence of life without parole. Inmate Fate Vincent
Winslow is serving his life sentence for selling $10 worth of
marijuana to an undercover cop. Like Jackson, Winslow’s crime was
his fourth offense in Louisiana.

Another inmate’s story, that of Dicky Joe Jackson, is
reminiscent of the plight of Breaking
Bad protagonist Walter White. To pay for his
son’s $250,000 life-saving bone marrow transplant, Jackson started
transporting methamphetamine. Before long, however, he was caught
selling to an undercover officer. SWAT teams raided his family’s
home, and Jackson was thrown in federal prison. He is nearly twenty
years into his lifelong sentence.

In addition to the inmate profiles—which are a horribly
depressing, but worthwhile read—the report discovered several
interesting facts about life without parole (LWOP) in the US.

The Number of LWOP Sentences Has Been Growing For
Decades

Offenders serving life without parole, whether violent or not,
has been one of the most rapidly growing populations in the prison
system. According to the report: “The number of people sentenced to
LWOP quadrupled nationwide between 1992 and 2012, from 12,453 to
49,081.”

LWOP Is Due to the War on Drugs, Mandatory Minimums, and
Other “Tough on Crime” Policies

Nearly 80 percent of non-violent LWOP offenses are for drug
crimes. Among the cases the ACLU surveyed, 83 percent of offenders
were placed there because of mandatory minimums or three-strike
laws—in other words, the judges had no choice. As the ACLU
said:

The prevalence of LWOP sentences for nonviolent offenses is a
symptom of the relentless onslaught of more than four decades of
the War on Drugs and “tough-on crime” policies, which drove the
passage of unnecessarily harsh sentencing laws, including
three-strikes provisions…and mandatory minimum sentences.

There Are Racial Disparities

Like most aspects of the criminal justice system, there are
stark racial disparities in life without parole sentences.
Sixty-five percent of LWOP inmates are black, while in some states
the disparity is even higher. In Louisiana, 91 percent are black.
In the federal system, blacks are 20 times more likely to be
sentenced to LWOP than whites.

This Is A Uniquely American Problem

The US is part of the mere 20 percent of countries that even
offer LWOP sentences. And of those countries, the vast majority
“place stringent restrictions on where they can be issued and limit
their use to crimes of murder.” As a result, the US’s LWOP prison
population dwarfs that of other countries’. According to the
University of San Francisco’s report
on U.S. Sentencing Practices in a Global Context, the US’s LWOP
population is 51 times greater than Australia’s and 173 times
greater than England’s. 

The District Attorney’s office in Middlesex
County, Massachusetts ruled that no criminal charges should be
filed in the death of Alyssa Brame, who was arrested on January 12
for allegedly offering to perform a sex act of some kind for $40
and died of alcohol poisoning in a jail cell. The five (5!)
officers who were on the scene at her arrest claimed she did not
appear visibly overly
intoxicated, but by the time she was taken to the police station
she couldn’t walk on her own, and cops there debated whether she
was too drunk to be accused of offering sex for money.
Via the Lowell Sun:

As that debate continued, only detention attendant
Kevin Lombard asked whether someone should call an ambulance.

“Civilian Attendant Lombard did not feel that he was permitted to
contact 911 for medical assistance himself,” District Attorney
Marian Ryan wrote in the report.

The report says a sergeant told Lombard no. Another commander told
Lombard to simply “let her lay down.”

According to Ryan’s investigation, “police personnel determined
that this was another one of those occasions where Ms. Brame was
intoxicated and needed to sleep it off.”

The DA report found that putting an unconscious person in a
cell, as had been done to Brame, was against department policy, as
was not checking on her every thirty minutes. It had been nearly an
hour since police last checked on her when she was found dead. The
third policy violation had to do with the personnel dealing with
Brame not being CPR-certified.

The medical examiner ruled the death an accident, but noted it
may have been possible to save Brame’s life if there had been a
medical intervention earlier. The DA report says Brane, 31, had
been in police custody ten times before, nine of those while
intoxicated. It also mentioned police were aware the city hospital
believed they were sending too many intoxicated prisoners over.
It’s impossible to know whether Brane would have survived alcohol
poisoning absent her encounter with police, but being thrown in a
cage for making a harmless offer, in an environment where a
concerned person would feel they weren’t permitted to call 911 for
assistance, certainly didn’t help.

A police board of inquiry is now investigating the case.

Nine years ago, Weldon Angelos, a
24-year-old rap music entrepreneur in Salt Lake City,
was sentenced to
55 years in federal prison for three small-time marijuana sales. In
a letter released
today, 113 concerned citizens, including 60 former prosecutors, 17
former judges, seven former state attorneys general, and four
former governors, remind President Obama that he has the power to
free Angelos, whose case is frequently cited to illustrate the
injustices resulting from mandatory minimum sentences.

U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell, who imposed what may well
amount to a life sentence on Angelos, called it “unjust, cruel, and
even irrational” but noted that his hands were tied by the
mandatory minimums Congress prescribed for people who engage in
drug trafficking while possessing a gun: five years for the first
offense and 25 years for each subsequent offense. Angelos, a
first-time offender, had a handgun concealed under his clothing
during two pot sales; the third count was tied to guns police found
when they searched his home. He never brandished a gun, let alone
fired one, and no one but Angelos and his family suffered as a
result of the marijuana sales, which involved a total of a pound
and a half. The letter urging Obama to commute Angelos’
sentence, which was organized by the Constitution Project,
highlights the perversity of the penalty he received:

Had Mr. Angelos been charged in [a Utah] court…he would have
been paroled years ago. Indeed, Mr. Angelos’s sentence is longer
than the punishment imposed on far more serious federal offenses
and offenders. His term of imprisonment exceeds the federal
sentence for, among others, an aircraft hijacker, a second-degree
murderer, a kidnapper, and a child rapist. Incredibly, Mr.
Angelos’s sentence is longer than those imposed for three aircraft
hijackings, three second-degree murders, three kidnappings, or
three rapes. In fact, the 55-year sentence for possessing a firearm
three times in connection with minor marijuana offenses is more
than twice the federal sentence for a kingpin of a major drug
trafficking ring in which a death results, and more than four times
the sentence for a marijuana dealer who shoots an innocent person
during a drug transaction.

That’s right: Angelos would have been treated less severely if
he had shot the police informant posing as a customer instead of
selling him pot twice more. The sentence was so egregious, the
letter notes, that in 2006 “a group of 145 individuals—including
former U.S. Attorneys General, retired U.S. Circuit Court Judges,
retired U.S. District Court judges, a former Director of the FBI,
former U.S. Attorneys, and other former high-ranking U.S. Justice
Department officials—submitted a brief amici curiae in
support of Mr. Angelos’s case.”

As the letter points out, Angelos’ 55-year prison term is
precisely the sort of grossly disproportionate penalty that Obama
decried before he was elected president. In a 2007
speech at Howard University, for example, Obama noted that
George W. Bush had at one point questioned long sentences for
first-time drug offenders. “I agree with George W. Bush,” Obama
said. “The difference is he hasn’t done anything about it. When I’m
President, I will. We will review these sentences to see where we
can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive
warehousing of nonviolent offenders.” Has he delivered on that
promise?

In 2010, to Obama’s credit, he signed the Fair Sentencing Act,
which reduced (but did not eliminate) the irrational sentencing
disparity between the snorted and smoked forms of cocaine. But
since that law passed Congress almost unanimously, supporting it
did not take much courage. Last August, four and half years into
Obama’s presidency, his attorney general, Eric Holder,
announced a new policy under which federal prosecutors are
supposed to exclude drug weights from charges against certain
low-level, nonviolent offenders to avoid triggering mandatory
minimums. That policy, assuming that U.S. attorneys comply with it,
has the potential to
shorten the prison terms of about 500 people, 2 percent of the
25,000 federal drug offenders sentenced each year.

But Obama has conspicuously failed to use his commutation power
to shorten sentences that he and Holder have both called
excessively long—including those imposed on crack offenders before
passage of the Fair Sentencing Act, which did not apply
retroactively. He has issued only
one commutation and 39 pardons in
nearly five years, which so far makes him the least merciful
president in U.S. history (once you exclude, as seems only fair,
the first president’s first term and the abbreviated terms of two
presidents who died shortly after they were elected).

In light of Obama’s amazingly stingy clemency
record, this kowtowing passage from the Constitution Project’s
letter is laughable (although I understand why it was
included):

We recognize that the executive clemency power has been
besmirched in recent years by a few tawdry cases. But we also know
that you, as a former constitutional law professor and keen student
of history, appreciate the vital function that clemency plays in
our tripartite system of checks and balances.

The letter includes 28 footnotes, but none of them provides
evidence to back up that assertion, because there is precious
little. Obama still has time to provide some more, and freeing
Weldon Angelos would be a good place to start.

Marine Le Pen
and Geert Wilders, two of Europe’s best-known nationalist leaders,
vowed today at a news conference to work together ahead of the
European elections next year to free Europeans from what Wilders
described as “the monster in Brussels.”

From
The Wall Street Journal:

Two of Europe’s most prominent nationalist leaders pledged
Wednesday to drive a shared anti-euro, anti-immigration line in
European elections next spring and pull other right-wing parties
into their movement.

In a joint news conference in The Hague, France’s Marine Le Pen
and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders said they would seek to take
powers back from European Union institutions in Brussels,
hoping to tap into opposition to EU controls that has grown amid
the financial crisis.

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