Court Opinion

ID: 9797307
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:18:08.942537+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:54:23.472533
License: Public Domain

*581EDMONDS, J.,
concurring.
As one of two former trial judges on this court, I bring a perspective to this case based, in part, on the experience of having sentenced persons to periods of incarceration.1 My experience tells me that the mandatory minimum sentence required in this case is unjust because the punishment imposed by the statute is not the just desert of the circumstances of the crime. But whether the required sentence achieves justice is not the question before us. The electorate has made a value judgment about the severity of punishment in these kinds of cases, and my understanding of our role as interpreters of the constitution is that we are constrained to uphold the law unless we can say, based on our value judgment, that the sentence shocks the conscience of all reasonable people. I am unable to say that, particularly in light of the fact that, near the time of the adoption of Article I, section 16, defendant could have been sentenced to not less than three and not more than 20 years for the same crime.

 That is not to say that my perspective is better than that of my colleagues, only to say it arises from a different experiential base.