Opinion ID: 355911
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Seriousness of the Crimes Here Involved.

Text: 59 We must first evaluate the seriousness of the crimes for which the individual defendants were sentenced. The fact that New York houses half the drug addicts in the country, if indeed it does, is only peripherally relevant. New York's drug problem is a socioeconomic phenomenon or set of phenomenae attributable to a great many factors with which the appellees have had nothing whatsoever to do. Appellees were not prosecuted for having initiated the phenomenon. They have participated only at the very lowest level of the scale. 60 Stripped to the essentials of what is involved, Ms. Fowler sold one individual dose of cocaine; Ms. Carmona possessed one ounce of cocaine; and both received sentences of life imprisonment. Yet, their crimes can hardly be considered as intrinsically serious on the one hand 25 and as inherently essential to the business of drug trafficking on the other as the crimes of the bigger wholesalers, importers, dealers or distributors of that drug or of heroin. 26 Nevertheless all receive the same maximum life sentence. 61 New York has completely lost sight of the true nature of the crimes involved. Appellees are not major traffickers or hardened criminals. Their offenses are simply not sufficiently horrendous to warrant life imprisonment. A perceptive federal judge has noted that (l)ife imprisonment is the penultimate punishment. Tradition, custom, and common sense reserve it for those violent persons who are dangerous to others. It is not a practical solution to petty crime in America. Aside from the proportionality principle, there aren't enough prisons in America to hold all the (Carmonas and Fowlers) that afflict us. Hart v. Coiner, supra, 483 F.2d at 141.