Court Opinion

ID: 9498846
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:29:35.950095+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:06.371464
License: Public Domain

MERRITT, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
The penalogical reasons Mahon should be incarcerated for 15 years in this false statement firearms case are not apparent from the record, and I suspect that what we are sanctioning here is a gross injustice. The prior convictions in question are more than 20 years old. The nature of the crime involving a pawned shotgun is grossly disproportionate to the sentence. The District Judge thought so, and I expect that almost all judges would agree. Once again, this is what happens when Congress vests the sentencing power in one interested party to the litigation — the prosecutor — -by making a long mandatory sentence depend not on an objective evaluation of the crime by a neutral magistrate but rather the discretionary charging authority of the prosecutor. We do not now have before us the serious due process problem latent in these facts, and so my responsibility as a judge requires me to *537concur, as I see it. Perhaps it is an issue that defense should consider raising on remand.