Court Opinion

ID: 9485931
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:34:06.124641+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:27.072372
License: Public Domain

NATHANIEL R. JONES, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the result reached in this case. The law leaves me no choice. In doing so, I am nonetheless constrained to note that this ease is but the latest instance of mandatory minimum sentencing requirements intruding upon an Article III judge’s ability to do justice. Common sense is removed from the sentencing process when a judge is barred from fashioning a punishment that fits the unique circumstances presented by a defendant in a particular case.
U.S. District Judge Vincent Broderick of the Southern District of New York, the retiring chairman of the Committee on Criminal Law of the Judicial Conference of the United States, voiced the frustration and outrage of the collective Bench when he recently testified before a House Judiciary Subcommittee. He called upon Congress “to repeal all current mandatory minimum sentencing provisions.”
Judge Broderick, a former police commissioner of the City of New York and former federal prosecutor, declared that the “mandatory mínimums are the major obstacle to the development of a fair, rational, honest and proportional federal criminal justice sentencing system.” He added that “Congress has made it in many cases impossible for the judge, today, fairly and honestly to perform his or her role.”
I submit that by concurring in this court’s majority opinion, which the law requires me to do, I am joining in a result that is neither rational nor honest. In doing so, I am, as are all judges, compelled to close my eyes and my mind to a reality of the sentencing decision that recognizes, as Judge Broderick reminded the Congressional committee: that “the criminal as an individual human being stands in the well of the court, and there are a myriad of different considerations which should go into the judge’s sentencing decision.”
It may yet dawn on makers of public policy, that an unacceptable social price is being paid for this folly.