Sentencing Disparity Quotes

Defendants are being evaluated based on numerical grid without any aggravating circumstances being considered. The effect has been to transfer the disparity from the judge to the prosecutor allowing for a great deal of leeway on indictments.

Transgender people frequently face bias in court and are assigned unsupportive public defenders, factors which lead to more extreme sentences and longer incarcerations.

I support the death penalty for the kingpin, the guy at the top, but I don't think you should throw a drug offender in jail for five years, and let a mugger out after a year.

Mandatory sentencing guidelines have become as complicated and detailed as the IRS code!

Evidence of sentencing disparity visited on those who exercise their Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury is today stark, brutal, and incontrovertible.

All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.

Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are.

Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered. Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses were passed by Congress in the 1980s as part of the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement, sentences that have helped to fuel our nation's prison boom and have also greatly aggravated racial disparities, particularly in the application of mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine.

What defenders of the system typically fail to acknowledge is that the reason violent offenders comprise a fairly large percentage of the state prison population is because they typically receive longer sentences than non-violent offenders.

You can put a person in jail for 5 years, for 10 years, or 20 years, for the same crime. We're deciding on 10 years to 20 years, when 5 years would be enough. Okay. The deterrent value, the additional amount of leverage that you get over a criminal to keep them from breaking the law in the first place, associated with making the sentences longer, is de minimous; it's essentially nothing.

Murder cases in which the victim was white were almost twice as likely to result in the death penalty as cases in which the victim was black, and blacks who killed whites were two and a half times more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who killed whites.

After all, a district judge who gives harsh sentences to Yankees fans and lenient sentences to Red Sox fans would not be acting reasonably even if her procedural rulings were impeccable.

The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders tells us who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominately white and male.