Are you in favor of the system of stern federal sentencing that has helped reduce crime to levels not seen since the Baby Boomers were in grade school?
If so, you're not merely mistaken, misguided or misinformed. You're in bed with lynching.
That is the level of "argument" -- indeed, that is exactly the argument -- put forth in a new article by a sitting US District Judge, Mark Bennett of Iowa. The article, available here, is titled, "A Slow Motion Lynching? The War on Drugs, Mass Incarceration, Doing Kimbrough Justice, and a Response to Two Third Circuit Judges."
Never one to appeal to emotion or fiction, Judge Bennett starts his hatchet job on those who disagree with him with this:
The 2014 Best Picture Oscar winner, 12 Years a Slave, is based on the 1853 autobiography by Solomon Northup.1 Northrup, a black freeman in New York, was kidnapped and sold into Southern slavery.2 There is an eternally haunting, prolonged, and grueling scene in the movie where Northup has a noose around his neck and strains for breath by tiptoeing on the ground to keep from being lynched.3 Other slaves on the plantation are paralyzed by fear and ignore him. Like a ballerina en pointe, Northup spends long hours in this slow motion lynching dance until he is rescued by his owner.
This article is supposed to be about modern federal sentencing, mind you.
Of course, a number of paragraphs later, Bennett inserts the obligatory if limp disclaimer, a disclaimer embarrassing for its blase' insincerity:
This Article does not suggest that incarcerating almost exclusively black men for unprecedented lengthy terms of incarceration, for crack cocaine offenses they illegally committed, is the equivalent of lynching innocent blacks. It does, however, suggest both actions have strong racial overtones; both share a lack of public outcry; both share tacit public complicity; both share governmental complicity; both share devastating effects on families, children, and neighborhoods; and both have been accomplished largely at the hands of those unknown--at least to the general public.
Personally, I no longer wish to remain unknown the general public. I am one of those who supported, and continues enthusiastically to support, putting the burdens of crime on those who commit it rather than those whose lives are damaged (and sometimes destroyed) by it. Maybe I should make a truthful man of Judge Bennett by going outside and throwing a noose over a tree limb.
One can expect this kind of vicious, unhinged rhetoric from interest group advocates, I guess. But when it comes from a sitting judge, it's worse than worrisome. Can any Assistant US Attorney hope for a fair shake in this man's courtroom? What chance is there that he will "hold the balance, nice, clear and true" (Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (2009))?
But it's more than just one bitter, biased judge that's the problem. Those of us on the conservative side of criminal law issues are the objects of unceasing, condescending lectures about the need for civil discourse -- said lectures being delivered by the same crowd that gushes over this sort of vile attack on anyone who sees things differently.
So what can be done?