[Jerome Butler's] death was one of 10 in the Sacramento area in just 12 days that doctors have traced to heavy fentanyl-laced narcotics being sold as generic opioids on the streets.
"This is not bathroom biochemistry. It's going to be very sophisticated." Sophisticated and deadly, said Dr. Timothy Albertson, a toxicologist at UC Davis Medical Center.
"It is probably 100 times more potent that than morphine."
DEA special agent John Martin says the illegal fentanyl has made a long journey to get here.
"We believe it is manufactured in China, it is being distributed to Mexico, it is brought up through the normal drug smuggling routes of the southwest border."
In other words, this is not the legitimate pharmaceutical industry, nor is it over-prescribing pain doctors. It's the drug cartels and their street pushers -- exactly the people backers of the SRCA blandly (and deceitfully) describe as "low-level, non-violent offenders."
Perhaps the comments section will tell us why people who distribute this stuff on Sacramento's streets should have softer sentencing at the very moment their quite lucrative business is making life busy in the morgue.
Why do you differentiate between "the legitimate pharmaceutical industry" and "over-prescribing pain doctors" from street dealing?
Perhaps the reason why federal drug sentencing needs reform is recognition that the categories you differentiate are not so dissimilar in terms of culpability, but the participants are sentenced very differently.
The Frederick Purdue executives that misled the public about OxyContin thereby contributing to the opioid epidemic received no jail time. How is society safer when it punishes these guys with no jail time, but sentences the Sacramento drug dealer to at least a decade in prison.
The SRCA would reduce the 10 ten year statutory minimum to a five year statutory minimum for certain drug offenses committed by an individual that did not play a supervisory role in the offense, did not import/export or manufacture the drug, and has no prior serious drug felony or violent.
What minimum sentence is appropriate for the drug offender with no serious drug or violent crime felonies, who ranked at the bottom of the drug organization's hierarchy?
"Perhaps the comments section will tell us why people who distribute this stuff on Sacramento's streets should have softer sentencing" -- Sentencing should be nuanced. If you want a substantive response identify a particular scenario you think the current system adequately addresses, but would not be adequately addressed under the SRCA. Generally, many proponents of sentencing reform take issue with the current law's failure to accurately capture culpability, rejecting the "in for a penny in for a pound" sentencing model. This position rejects the system itself and not necessarily the substantive sentences imposed in that system.
"Why do you differentiate between 'the legitimate pharmaceutical industry and 'over-prescribing pain doctors' from street dealing?"
Because the manufacture of FDA approved pain medication is legal, needed and wholesome, and street peddling of deadly chemicals quite properly isn't.
Over-prescribing doctors should be prosecuted, but the huge majority of pain doctors do not over-prescribe and help perfectly legitimate patients.
Plus, let's not kid ourselves. If the USAO ever went after over-prescribing doctors, you would be the first one to argue to the jury, "Why does the government think it knows more about patients than their own doctors? This is just an attempt to block innocent patients from getting the help they desperately need, and another instance of arrogant prosecutors thinking they are entitled to intimidate the medical profession. My client, Dr. Smith here, merely used his best medical judgment. Pushing the boundaries of pain management may be controversial with the stuffed suits in the prosecutor's office, but it a Godsend to many patients, some of whom I'll be calling to the stand. This whole prosecution is an authoritarian fraud."
More broadly, I don't think readers are going to have a lot of trouble differentiating between street pushers and legitimate physicians. But even if there were no difference -- which is what you imply -- the answer, in our present overdose crisis, would not be to go easier on the street pushers, but to go harder on the pill-mill doctors.
Melissa hits a key point re the SRCA's sentencing provisions: by reducing some mandatory minimums, all they fundamentally do is shift slightly more sentencing power away from federal prosecutors and give that power to judges by giving them a little more sentencing discretion. Given cases like Weldon Angelos and Chris Williams (and many others) in which existing mandatory sentencing provisions were used by prosecutors required judges to impose extreme sentenicing outcomes in not-so-serious drug dealing cases, the need for some "fix" like the SRCA seems plain (though I would have like to see the much simpler JSVA enacted a few year ago).
Meanwhile, the uptick in opioid problems and harms is proof that the existing enforcement models are not working great. In other setting you use crime reductions as a reason not to mess with the status quo, but here you use crime increases. I understand the strategic benefits to a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to sentencing reform, but I do not find it all that convincing once you move past the surface rhetoric.
"Melissa hits a key point re the SRCA's sentencing provisions: by reducing some mandatory minimums, all they fundamentally do is shift slightly more sentencing power away from federal prosecutors and give that power to judges by giving them a little more sentencing discretion."
The past 50 years show that the public does better with the present balance of discretion between judges and prosecutors than the one in the Sixties and Seventies that was tilted more toward judges. Discretion got shifted away from judges because they did a lousy job with it. When judges lost (relative) power, incarceration increased and crime plummeted.
Angelos and Williams assumed the risk. It's past time for them to take responsibility for their own fate, rather than spending years snarling blame at everyone else. They made their own choices.
I have no gripe with prosecutors who charge against the defendant the conduct he actually undertook. The most important thing indictments should do is tell the truth. The defendant has it wholly within his power to fix the problem BEFORE THERE EVER IS A PROBLEM. Why should the system bow down to guilty people who, for profit, made their own knowing choices?
"Meanwhile, the uptick in opioid problems and harms is proof that the existing enforcement models are not working great."
Does the 17% national spike in murder last year likewise show that sentencing for murder is "not working that great?" Should we, therefore, in response to the murder crisis, lower penalties for murder??
It is this kind of thinking, not the machinations of NAAUSA, that tells us all we need to know about why the SRCA has run out of gas.
The 1990's are a huge demonstration that, when you have a surging crime problem, you help fix it with more prison, not less. I don't understand why the country would want to turn away from policies that work to return to ones that fail.
Bill, you eagerness to conflate and use distorted rhetoric these conversations frustrating. Nevertheless, let me try to add some cogency in response:
1. Nobody is seeking a return to the Sixties and Seventies era of ZERO sentencing law with trial judge and parole officials making all federal sentencing decisions. There is broad consensus we should have some federal sentencing law; the debate over the enacted FSA and the proposed JSVA and SSA and SRCA is how we might make federal sentencing law better to improve public safety, reduce government expense, and better serve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Some states have had some success improving their drug sentencing laws, and the feds ought to build on these proven successes.
2. Nobody claims Angelos and Williams should not be held responsible for dealing marijuana illegally while in possession of guns. What many claim is that federal sentencing law can and should be improved so that Angelos and Williams would not face mandatory functional LWOP sentences simply because federal prosecutors were eager to charge them in ways that would require them to plead guilty to avoid such extreme mandated sentences for relatively low-level offenses. This is not about "blaming" others or "bowing down" to guilty individuals; these cases simply show how prosecutors can make poor use of the extreme power federal sentencing law now gives big govt officials without any checks or balances. (Especially notable as Angelos and Williams still sit in federal prison is the thousands of individuals in dozens of states are currently selling a lot more marijuana for a lot more profit than Angelos or Williams ever did.)
3. The uptick in opioid problems combined with current criminal justice drug prohibition models may in part account for the national murder spike. Murder spiked dramatically during alcohol Prohibition, but I suppose you would have been arguing in the early 1930s that more prison, not less, is how we ought to have deal with the harms of alcohol and Prohibition. At the same time you (falsely) assert sentencing reformers want to return to failed sentencing policies of the 1960s, you showcase that drug warriors like you refuse to acknowledge the lessons of the failures of alcohol Prohibition of the 1920s.
4. Long story short, Bill, you persistently showcase in these kinds of threads that I am right to call you a big-government guy: when you identify a problem --- here opioid overdose deaths --- you are quick to assert "OBVIOUSLY WE NEED MORE GOVERNMENT" and you challenge those who believe LESS government might be worth trying after 45 years of big government involvement in this space. As a purported fan of Reagan, I would not think I would need to remind you of his famous quote in this context: "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
I'll take this a little at a time, starting with this:
"Nobody is seeking a return to the Sixties and Seventies era of ZERO sentencing law with trial judge and parole officials making all federal sentencing decisions. There is broad consensus we should have some federal sentencing law; the debate over the enacted FSA and the proposed JSVA and SSA and SRCA is how we might make federal sentencing law better to improve public safety, reduce government expense, and better serve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Some states have had some success improving their drug sentencing laws, and the feds ought to build on these proven successes."
1. No one (or at least only a few) will ADMIT to wanting to the judicial imperialism of the Sixties and Seventies, but the lack of admission isn't working. What the sentencing reform side wants is to advance the power of judges (who, last I heard, are also part of government).
In fact, you yourself think the law would be better if we had no MM's, is that correct?
2. Sentencing law at its current harsh levels has ALREADY improved public safety. That fact cannot sensibly be denied. Nor, truth be told, do such organizations as the ACLU or the NACDL give two hoots in hell about public safety. What they care about is accusing Amerika of being the Klan in shoddy disguise.
3. Sentencing reform WILL NOT REDUCE GOVERNMENT EXPENSE, as I'm certain you know. It will simply shift government expenses to programs more in keeping with the government's criminals-are-victims ideology.
In addition, as crime grows, there will be more expenses shifted to victims. What do sentencing reformers plan to do to allay those expenses? More taxes? More borrowing? Just ignore them?
4. What serves "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is the amazing reduction of 5.4 million serious crimes per year over the last 20 years. Reformers pooh-pooh this tremendous accomplishment because the people they really care about are the criminals whose incarceration has helped bring the benefit into being.
Criminals earn what they get by their own choices. I'm on the side of preserving our tremendous gains against crime.
5. States that have done sentencing "reform" have seen their RATES of crime reduction fall. Yes, there still is a decrease (for the time being), but that's because those states have preserved or increased the other factors (more police, etc.) that account for the bulk of crime reduction.
You continue to walk past the huge and shocking recidivism rate. As long as it's that high (half for federal inmates, three-quarters for state inmates), then, as a matter of simple math, earlier release means more crime faster.
I don't want more crime faster, but I do want to preserve the incredibly successful crime reduction policies we started in the Reagan/Bush years.
Again, Bill, your argument is based on silly rhetoric and a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to the data:
1. I do think federal laws would be better without those MMs that, in the words of Ted Cruz in his Brennan Center piece last year, give prosecutors "extraordinary power" to force judges to impose sentence that "neither fit the crime nor the perpetrator's unique circumstances." This is not a call for a return to the federal sentencing laws of 60s, it is an effort to reform the worst aspects of existing federal sentencing laws.
2. The assertion that the ACLU and the NACDL all only care about "accusing Amerika of being the Klan in shoddy disguise" is the kind of silly rhetoric that gets us Donal Trump. Are you plabnning to apply to be his AG?
3. You may be right that the big government DOJ folks in DC like you will find other ways to spend saving on federal prison, but that is hardly a justification for wasting money on depriving people like Angelos or Williams of freedom beyond what serves a clear law enforcement purpose.
4. I agree that reductions in violent crime are to be celebrated, but there is evidence that over-incarceration CONTRIBUTES to increased recidivism. Again, you argue prison works to reduce crime and say we should have more of it and then turn around and note how many commit crimes after release without recognizing (as recidivism studies suggest) that sending the wrong people to prison for too long INCREASES their likelihood of recidivism.
5. Let's ask now "what would Reagan do?" Actually, we know based on his efforts as Gov of California that he would likely try to reduce overcrowded prisons and reform sentencing laws.
Doug --
Just a few things.
-- One of the many reasons I support Ted Cruz is that he had the smarts to change his mind on sentencing "reform" and is now one of its key opponents. Your side fumbled him away with its dogmatism.
It is true, as he said, that prosecutors have extraordinary power. That is exactly what the Constitution envisions. And the Framers' wisdom has been vindicated, once more, by prosecutors' using that power in the last generation to help cut crime massively, to the great benefit of our country.
Of course, they did so over the outraged yelping of the defense bar every step of the way. Still, I get it that the defense bar doesn't give a hoot about crime victims and is therefore in a Big Snit that there are so many fewer of them.
Yes indeed. All in for the Blessed Client. Especially if it's Wendell Callahan.
-- There you go again! I never said the ACLU and the NACDL care "only" about "accusing Amerika of being the Klan in shoddy disguise." It is absolutely true that they care about other things as well, such as fabricating stories of innocence, making rote and reckless accusations against prosecutors, and arguing that the Wendell Callahan's of the world "pose no threat to the safety of the public." (Which I guess is true if one thinks that black lives don't matter; I personally have a different view).
-- Still, I'm glad you brought up what causes The Donald. Suggestion: One thing that causes him is that ordinary people (e.g., those without Harvard and Stanford degrees like you and me) have started to get it that your pals in the Washington Establishment like Leahy, Durbin, Cornyn, Speaker Ryan, and the President want to give poison-peddling felons a break so they can return to crime -- crime that won't touch the Big Shots but will hurt disproportionately the little guy.
P.S. Didn't you already promise the Trump AG position to Chris Christie?
-- Angelos' sentence should be shortened, as I have said many times. So why won't Obama shorten it? Too busy with trips to Cuba to salute Castro's dungeons?
As for Williams: As long as he insists that he gets to make his own law and to heck with everyone else, he deserves the fate his drug business earned him. When he changes his "I-do-whatever-I-want" attitude, I'll think about supporting clemency for him, too. But not before.
-- It is not up to the almighty state to get people to understand that they are required to obey democratically enacted law. It is up to the individual. Recidivism will slow down when crooks change the way they think, change their resentment, change their greed, change their selfishness, and straighten it up. I have neither the interest nor the power to do this for them.
But your point is misbegotten in any event. There is no evidence that recidivism was less in the Sixties and Seventies than it is now, in the era after we wised up and toughened up. If anything, the big drop in crime strongly suggests that there is LESS recidivism now.