Hat tip to Prof. Doug Berman for posting this entry, noting and linking a Reuters news story. It seems that the scandalous Stanford rape "sentence" has awoken the very liberal California state legislature to the need for -- ready now? -- mandatory minimum sentencing.
I don't know whether it's more unfortunate or more revealing that it takes a politically incorrect crime to jar these people into action. My own view (for the last few decades) has been that judges, like other people, operate better with rules than without.
There are numerous crimes so degrading, damaging and/or vicious that no combination of mitigating factors warrants a degree of leniency that would shock a normal person. That is where the legislature needs to step up. Giving judges a considerable degree of discretion in the great run of cases -- which we should -- does not require or even suggest giving them 100% discretion 100% of the time.
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