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IPFS News Link • Criminal Justice System

In America, Marijuana Offenders Get Life Sentences While Rapists Get 3-Months-- Justice is Broken

• http://www.trueactivist.com

By: Claire Bernish / (The Free Thought Project) Our so-called justice system makes a mockery of due process, couldn't care less about integrity, and victimizes those guilty of nonviolent crime — while releasing violent criminals to create actual victims in order to free up space to cage those who sell or possess a plant, even for medical reasons.

In perhaps the most striking example of justice upended, convicted rapist Brock Turner — who claimed of his victim in a police interview, "She seemed to enjoy it" — now walks free after serving just three of an abhorrently paltry six-month sentence for the violent crime.

Meanwhile, accounts like that of Jeff Mizanskey, who had been slated to die in jail after three exceedingly minor cannabis-related offenses earned him a life sentence, top the headlines with alarming frequency.

Although outrage over Mizanskey's court-induced punishment ultimately earned a commutation by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, 21 years of his life spent behind bars cannot be justified — no matter what erroneous propaganda the government shoves down our throats.

Mizanskey automatically earned the life sentence as dictated by Missouri's three strikes law — the controversial penalty system whereby anyone convicted of a third felony reflexively earns an arbitrarily harsh sentence, generally a life term, depending on the state. His three offenses, according to Reason, "included selling a small amount of pot to a relative, possessing less than three ounces in his home, and driving a friend to a hotel to buy pot from an undercover officer."

Hardly the stuff of a career criminal hell-bent on violently victimizing the public.

As of 2015, the federal government and 28 states — Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin — had some version of a three-strikes law on the books.

Three strikes laws have been ruled constitutional despite the seeming obvious contradiction to the Eighth Amendement's protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Worse, the laws are discretionarily applied, so, in cases of what are known as 'wobbler laws' — which are considered either a misdemeanor or felony, depending on both the circumstances and the ruling judge — courts can decide whether someone goes to prison for a few months or the rest of their lives.

Some states have reformed such laws to mandate only violent offenses trigger the third strike rule, but not-at-all surprisingly, minorities tend to receive the harshest sentences — a discriminatory practice which has only worsened over time.

Discretion and discrimination aren't limited purely to instances where three strikes laws kick in, and the cases of Brock Turner and Austin Wilkerson — who like Turner, sexually assaulted an incapacitated woman — aptly illustrate the seemingly limitless affront to justice.

Harsh prison sentences, by design, putatively punish the most dangerous criminals — and who poses more of a threat to society than a violent criminal ignorantly unaware their actions constitute a crime?

Two good samaritans happened upon Turner in the act of sexual assault in January 2015, and chased and held him down until authorities could arrive on scene; but despite the obvious crime of rape of an unconscious victim, Turner told police, according to court documents cited by KPIX-TV,

"I thought it was really weird the guy thought I was raping the girl."

Worse, he clearly did not grasp the gravity of his violent crime, as he stated, "My intentions were not to rape a girl. I was just trying to hook up with a girl," and further, "She seemed to enjoy it."

Turner even appeared to contradict himself: When asked by an officer, "At what point did she stop responding?" he replied, "Well, we didn't kiss the entire time."

Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen told the Washington Post in June, "To this day, the defendant denies what he did."

If judges are to be trusted with discretion in sentencing, Judge Aaron Persky didn't lend any integrity to the cause — Turner faced up to 14 years in prison, prosecutors asked for six — but, stating that a harsher penalty would "have a severe impact on him," the judge handed down a mere six months.

Turner served just three.

Contrast that to Mizanskey's 21 years behind bars and the arbitrariness of the American Injustice System is on full display. In fact, Turner's sentence has revived a troubling call to bring back mandatory minimums — another method of oppression similar to three strikes laws that continually punish people based almost solely on the crime committed, regardless of extenuating circumstances.

Persky's callous disregard for Turner's victim's suffering thus, in essence, re-opened the case for sending people to prison in record numbers.

Perhaps the debate shouldn't concern prison sentencing law at all. Perhaps it should instead spark a national discussion about the growing call to abolish the prison system altogether — and the case is surprisingly solid given potential alternatives.

First, consider the actuality prisons in no way rehabilitate inmates, but, instead, act as training facilities in which prisoners teach each other how better to perpetrate crimes. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry potently summarized for The Week:

"Prison is an incredibly stupid way to fight crime because, as is well known, it is the enemy of rehabilitation. In prison, criminal gangs flourish. This means prison becomes a graduate school for crime, a facility for turning mediocre criminals into hardened ones. More generally, who thinks locking up people in places where they are fed and housed and boxed up and surrounded only by other dysfunctional people is going to turn them into productive members of society? The idea would be laughable if it wasn't part of the status quo. Prison, by its very design, breeds crime and social dysfunction […]



 

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by Dennis Treybil
Entered on:

“There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading; a law which has come to us not by theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. ” Marcus Tullius Cicero


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