Former state judge laments "The Injustice of Sentencing Guidelines"

Glenna Hall, a retired superior court judge from Washington state, has this new commentary in The Atlantic headlined "The Injustice of Sentencing Guidelines." Here is a snippet:

For me, sentencing, particularly for drug crimes, was in many ways the hardest part of my work as a judge.  Not because the decisions or the work were hard (though of course they were), but because, given the restrictive nature of the sentencing guidelines in Washington, I had virtually no discretion or authority to consider anything about the human being standing before me.  I could consider only the nature of the crime, expressed in a number, and the number and kinds of offenses the defendant had committed, also expressed in a number.  From those two quantified factors was derived a quite narrow range I was required to use in imposing a sentence.  Except in a minuscule set of circumstances, I could only work within that range.  The temptation not to think at all but rather to pick a number in the middle was strong.

One Friday afternoon, during a weekly sentencing calendar, a middle-aged man in jail clothes stood before me.  Except for the orange jumpsuit, he could have been the guy behind the counter at the bank or post office.  His offender score was very high; he had a pages-long list of prior convictions: relatively minor drug crimes alternating with theft convictions and other crimes related to getting money to sustain a drug habit.  He wept as he told of us his long addiction and his recent attempts to get clean.  He couldn't go on living this way, he said.  He'd tried unsuccessfully to get into a treatment program, and he knew he wouldn't get any meaningful help in prison.  He begged me to help him get into some kind of program.  He was utterly convincing, and I realized he truly had grown ineffably weary of the addiction cycle and was ready to change.  By the time he finished speaking, I was the only person in the room not crying.  With a heavy heart, I told him the law gave me no choice: I had to give him a multiple-year sentence.  There were no available exceptions, and the prosecutor had no interest in finding a way to get this man the help he needed.

People like this appeared before me week after week.  I hated Fridays.  I came home from work with the memory of what seemed to me to be injustices I had done.  I considered resigning from the best job I had ever had.  I didn't quit, and I rotated off the calendar that involved weekly sentencings.  Later I volunteered to take on sentencing calendars that were harder to deal with but that carried penalties that seemed more rational to me than those required for drug crimes.

Eventually, Washington revised its drug sentencing laws to permit more leeway and more treatment options, but the state still has mandatory sentencing guidelines that can lead to harsh and unyielding results.