WATCH: Public defenders call to abolish mandatory minimums: “Prosecutors use them to coerce my clients into pleading guilty. They don’t want to risk 20 years. They’re innocent, but all a sudden, a trial becomes a crap shot of an all or nothing equation.”
What happens if you dont plead? One of the defenders tells story of a Florida man charged w/ burglary for going into a family member’s home & stealing a can of beer. Turned down relatively lenient offers. Prosecutor wouldnt dismiss. After trial sentenced to the minimum: 15 years!
Mandatory minimums swept the Nation in the 80s & 90s amid brutal “tough on crime” political campaigns, w/ promises that they’d reduce violent crime and, reduce racial & other disparities in sentencing from one defendant to the next. But neither of these promises was realized.
We know there’s little correlation between mandatory minimums and actual deterrence. Few, if any, outside the legal community could tell you the sentencing range of most crimes. In other words, mandatory minimum prison sentences don’t deter or prevent crime.
Worse still, it turns out mandatory minimums have done the opposite of reducing sentencing disparities. Why? Because they haven’t actually removed discretion in our system. Mandatory minimums just transfer discretion from judges to prosecutors.
By transferring power from judges to prosecutors, mandatory minimums create powerful incentives for prosecutors to overcharge defendants and scare them into pleading guilty. Why? If a charge carries a mandatory minimum the risks of trial become untenable.
Given that the majority of arrests and prosecutions target people of color from certain neighborhoods, these harsh penalties have an outsized effect on only a small subset of the population. Reducing transparency. Driving mass incarceration. Undermining the right to trials.
Mandatory minimums don’t just close off trial. As I wrote in NYT, they insulate police misconduct: "Victims of police abuse routinely forgo their constitutional right to challenge police abuse in exchange for plea deals out of fear.”nytimes.com/2019/09/25/opi…
