Class Warfare Through The Courtroom

Jun 25, 2014

Class Warfare Through The Courtroom

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  •    Recently, there has been abnormally heavy reporting in right wing media regarding various criminal cases in which people committing absolutely atrocious acts are getting impossibly light sentencing. In contrast, we are continually awash with stories of people convicted of minor drug offences or crimes in which nobody was hurt getting long sentences, including life in many cases. 
       Right wing media tend to focus on the light sentences for major crimes, and highlight them as an excuse to promote the idea of mandatory minimum sentencing. A recent example is Sunnew's coverage of the Nova Scotia man who paid to rape a boy chained in someone's basement. 
          As the Sun interview points out, the maximum in this case was 10 years, while the rapist got 2. 
          Anyone objectively surveying various cases in which people have gotten light sentences for major crimes including rape and murder, contrasted with others who get harsh sentences for drug offences or other victimless crimes, it is blatantly obvious that mandatory minimums just mean more poor people spend more time in jail for minor offences, because prosecutors can choose how they charge people, and people with more money can afford the kinds of lawyers that have methods available to induce prosecutors to switch to a lesser offence.
    The methods are illegal, they revolve around personal networks of associates and often 'brotherhoods' originating in our universities, a quiet system of mutual bribery that ensures that people with more money are always treated better than everyone else.
        But progressive/left oriented media have largely aggravated the problem by continually trying to keep discussions about the disparities focused on race rather than socio-economic status. 
     
      An example of this is the woman who was given life for firing a warning shot that didn't hit anyone contrasted with the case of a Latino man named George Zimmerman who killed a teenager.  Much of the coverage portrayed Zimmerman as white, but the bias was clearly not racial, Zimmerman was Hispanic and the 'charactar' defense centered on lifestyle differences between Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, the difference in the socio-economic status. 
        Notice that with mandatory minimums in the US, rich people still get off easy for major crimes while poor people do life for much less. In the 90s, New York mayor Marion Barry , a prominant African American politician, was treated very lightly compared to other people sentenced for crack offences.
         The bias in drug sentencing is often focused on crack, and so the disparities seem racial, because crack became more common in African American communities than elsewhere. 
     
    But the statistics on methamphetamine show a very different story, one that is clearly a socio-economic bias, since meth, like crack, is a 'poor people's drug'. 
    According to the Report to Congress: Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System;

    "(Methamphetamine Offenders Facing Mandatory Minimums, By Race/Ethnicity and Gender) "The demographic characteristics for methamphetamine offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty differ from those observed for most other major drug types in two ways. First, more than half (51.3%, n=1,776) of methamphetamine offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty are White and another 42.6 percent (n=1,476) are Hispanic. Black methamphetamine offenders constitute only 2.2 percent (n=77) of the methamphetamine offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty. This is the smallest proportion of Black offenders for any major drug type.675 In contrast, Other Race offenders constitute 3.8 percent (n=132) of the methamphetamine offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty, which is the largest proportion of Other Race offenders for any drug type.
    "Second, female offenders accounted for 18.1 percent (n=627) of all methamphetamine offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty. Although this not a large percentage, it is higher than both the proportion of female offenders in the overall population of drug offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty (10.2%, n=1,611) and the proportion of female offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty for any other drug type."

     
    References: 
     
     
     Richard Cohen, "Class, Not Race," New York Post (November 15, 1995), p. 25.
     
    Drug War Facts, Mandatory Minimums & the Federal Sentencing Guidelines
     
    Washington Post, October 27, 1990, Barry Sentenced To 6 Months. 
     
    Sun News, June 25, 2014, NOVA SCOTIA MAN WHO CHAINED, RAPED TEEN GETS TWO YEARS