Federal District Judge Mark "Bennett says 80% of the mandatory sentences he hands down are unjust"

The quote in the title of this post's headline is just one of a number of notable lines from this extended CNN article headlined "The judge who says he's part of the gravest injustice in America." Here is some of the context and particulars from the article:

[U.S. District Court Judge Mark] Bennett seems exasperated, exhausted almost, as he explains he must sentence [Susan] Rice to a full five years -- the mandatory minimum required by law. It is a sentence he deems unjust, too much for a low-level addict, just for being caught with a certain weight of drugs.  

Bennett makes sure the record reflects he felt strongly enough to request that Iowa's US Attorney consider waiving the mandatory minimum. He accepts the defense mitigation that Rice had never been in trouble before she was in her 50s, when she began drinking heavily after a bad divorce and was introduced to meth. She met a mid-level dealer who offered her a mattress in his basement and free meth if she would drive him around. A willing drug mule to feed her addiction? Yes. But not the drug trafficker or conspirator whom the charges and mandatory minimum sentences were designed to target, the judge believed.

His plea fell on deaf ears.  He was told there was no option for Rice to be treated as an exception to the law. "I strongly disagree with that decision," the judge says firmly from the bench.  It is not the first time he has felt this way. Bennett says 80% of the mandatory sentences he hands down are unjust -- but that he is handcuffed by the law, which leaves no room for judicial discretion to consider a sentence based on individual circumstances of the defendant. 

Too often, Bennett says, low-level nonviolent drug addicts dealing to feed their habit end up being sentenced like drug kingpins.  Bennett says if he had the power, he would jail Rice for perhaps a year, or 18 months.  Across the street in a state courthouse, she would have been put on probation, he says.  "I think it's a miscarriage of justice," Bennett says. "But you know people are entitled to their own sense of what justice is."

Bennett hoped the tide was turning after members of both parties began pushing for sentencing reform on both state and federal levels, arguing it had been a huge mistake.  Now Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump's attorney general, has instructed that the law governing mandatory minimums be enforced with renewed vigor. "If you are a drug trafficker," Sessions said after issuing his memo to prosecutors, "we will not look the other way. We will not be willfully blind to your misconduct."

Bennett thinks this approach is unjust. "I basically couldn't live with myself if I didn't speak out," he says, standing in the center of his courtroom only hours after sentencing Rice. "I'm compelled to talk about it because I think it's one of the gravest injustices in the history of America."  Year after year, giving out those sentences, is wearing on him.  "The burden of having given so many unjust sentences is a very heavy thing for me to carry around," Bennett says beginning to choke up. "I do not consider myself soft on crime, but I consider myself opposed to mandatory minimums for low level non-violent drug dealers who are basically addicts," he says....

The National Association of Assistant US Attorneys, made up of those who prosecute federal cases, supports Sessions' push to charge the most serious crime that is provable.  "It's an effective way of protecting the public and it has served us well for an awful long time," the group's president Larry Leiser says.  "People who were eligible for mandatory minimums are truly people who are involved in significant quantities of these very dangerous substances."  He rejects recent efforts to relax sentencing laws.  And he rejects the view the law unfairly catches non-violent addicts who are simply feeding their addiction by selling drugs.  And he hails the provision that lets offenders help themselves to lower sentences if they in turn help the authorities take serious criminals off the streets.