http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425365/print Keep Minimum Sentencing, to Discourage Criminals
By Andrew C. McCarthy — October 10, 2015
‘I know you lied in your testimony, but I understand why you believed you had to do it.”
If there was an audible sound in the courtroom after these words left the lips of the sentencing judge, it was my jaw caroming off the floor. I was a young prosecutor and it was the mid Eighties, before federal sentencing reforms substituted the public’s sensibilities for the judges’ in the matter of serious crime.
The defendant had been convicted of selling cocaine, an offense he compounded by perjuring himself in testimony so absurd that even my novice cross-examiner’s skills were enough to expose it. The judge was a notoriously defendant-friendly sentencer, but even jurists of that bent of mind do not like having their intelligence insulted: When a serious felony was complemented by blatant lying under oath, a serious jail sentence was in order.
But not this time. To my dismay, the judge shrugged his shoulders and did what lots of judges did in those days, and what Washington’s bipartisan political class seems to want them to start doing again: He walked the defendant out the door.
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