Court Opinion

ID: 9483105
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:11:18.54655+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:25.704761
License: Public Domain

BRIGHT, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring separately.
I write separately to comment about the cruel sentences imposed on Stockton and Badley, and to observe that, although not illegal, these sentences emanate from a law gone awry.
Sentences ought to balance punishment with societal needs as well as some concern for the offender. Under the sentencing guidelines, a judge can exercise little, if any, judgment on these matters. The probation officer computes the sentence; the judge generally only ratifies it.
In this case, both offenders will serve nearly twenty years in prison for their first offenses. Stockton, now only age twenty-six, will be forty-five years old when he emerges from prison. Badley, now age forty-four, will be sixty-three years old when he is released, assuming he can survive that long. The cost to the government and its taxpayers will be approximately $680,542 (38 years times $17,909; this figure does not include inflation).1 The suffering imposed on these men and their families cannot be calculated in monetary terms.
In my judgment, this sort of massively heavy punishment cannot be justified in a civilized society, unless there is a showing that lengthy incarcerations protect society from incorrigible and continuing criminals.
No such showing has been made in this case.
As our federal prisons, already at 165% capacity,2 include non-violent first-time offenders, many serving near-life sentences, they begin to resemble the barbaric Turkish prisons depicted in the 1978 academy-award-winning motion picture Midnight Express.3 That film shocked the public by presenting the true story of a young American tourist named Billy Hayes who was arrested in Turkey for heroin smuggling and sentenced to thirty years in prison by the Turkish courts. The public should be similarly shocked if it knew of the excessive sentences that can be and are imposed on first-time offenders.
The Sentencing Commission has created a system for punishing drug offenders based almost solely on the weight of drugs, and not based on the criminality of offenders. This system runs counter to the Con*722gressional directive that this court shall impose a sentence that is sufficient, “but not greater than necessary to comply” with the sentencing objectives established by Congress. 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) (1988); see also United States v. England, 966 F.2d 403, 411 (8th Cir.1992) (Bright, J., concurring); United States v. Quarles, 955 F.2d 498, 505 (8th Cir.1992) (Bright, J., concurring and dissenting).
Although the Sentencing Commission and Congress, in their war on drugs, intended to use long sentences as weapons to deter drug crime, doubt exists that longer sentences have had any deterrent effect on crime. See Freed, supra note 2, at 1707; Andrew Ashford, Sentencing Purposes in England, 3 Fed.Sent.Rep. 337, 338 (1991). These excessively long sentences mandated by the guidelines waste the lives of many men and women. Yet, can we say we are winning the war on drugs? It is time for a new and more rational look at sentencing. See, e.g., Gerald W. Heaney, The Reality of Guideline Sentencing: No End to Disparity, 28 Am.Crim.L.Rev. 161 (1991).
While I am obligated to affirm the sentences, I need not put my stamp of approval on them.

. See United States v. Quarles, 955 F.2d 498, 505 n. 6 (Bright, J., concurring and dissenting).

. Daniel J. Freed, Federal Sentencing in the Wake of the Guidelines: Unacceptable Limits on the Discretion of Sentencers, 101 Yale L.J. 1681, 1700 n. 102 (1992) (citing Attorney General William P. Barr, Remarks to the California District Attorneys Association (Jan. 14, 1992)).

. The United States incarcerates more than one million people, a larger share of its population than any other nation, according to the Sentencing Project, a non-profit research organization. United States Leads in Imprisonment, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 6, 1991, at 6E.