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Opinions of Judges
 February
25, 2005 - The Orange County Register (CA)
Commentary: Our Absurd Drug War And The Judge Who Just Said
No
By Paul Campos, University Of Colorado Law Professor &
Scripps Howard Columnist
In 1988, Brent J. Brents raped a 6-year-old boy, by luring
him into a secluded spot with a tale about a lost cat. Eight
days later, Brents raped a 9-year-old girl at knifepoint, while
threatening to kill her if she cried out.
Brents, who already had a long criminal record, was sent to
prison, where he served 15 years of a 20-year term. Last summer,
state sentencing laws required him to be released, even though
he had dropped out of a sex-offender rehabilitation program.
Now he is accused of molesting an 8-year-old boy, and raping
two grade-school girls and their grandmother, as well as three
other adult women.
In the summer of 2002, Weldon Angelos, a 23-year-old with
no criminal record, sold $350 worth of marijuana on three occasions
to a man who turned out to be a police informant.
At one of the sales, Angelos had a gun strapped to his ankle.
At the others, he had one hidden in his car. (Angelos never brandished
the gun, nor did he engage in any other violent behavior.)
Last November, in an extraordinary 67-page opinion, U.S. District
Judge Paul Cassell sentenced Angelos to 55 years in federal prison,
without the possibility of parole.
The opinion was extraordinary in that it called upon President
Bush to use his powers of executive clemency to reduce what Cassell
considered a barbaric sentence a sentence that our so-called
federal sentencing "guidelines" (somewhere, George
Orwell is laughing grimly) required Cassell to impose.
Cassell's opinion, which is well worth reading in its entirety,
is both anguished and courageous. The judge is clearly revolted
by what he believes the law requires him to do, and he searches
for some constitutional argument that would allow him to strike
down a law that is sending a 25-year-old nonviolent offender
with no criminal record to prison for what may well be the rest
of his life.
That he is unable to find it is a tribute to Cassell's intellectual
integrity, whether one agrees with his legal conclusions or not.
Cassell is no bleeding-heart liberal. I remember the talk
he gave at the University of Colorado law school more than a
decade ago, when he was on the market for a legal academic job:
it was a frontal assault on the Miranda warning that offended
enough of the faculty to preclude him from getting a job offer,
despite his obvious talent.
When he was appointed to the federal bench two years ago,
Cassell's conservative credentials were considered impeccable.
But even the hardest-headed conservative can be horrified by
the sheer insanity of the war on drugs.
In sentencing Angelos, Cassell pointed out that he would have
gotten a far lighter sentence if he had been a terrorist who
detonated a bomb, or if he had been convicted of second-degree
murder, or if he had raped a child.
Even in a nation that has found room to put 2 million of its
citizens behind bars, there is only so much space in our prisons.
Brents didn't serve all of his original sentence, in part, because
there simply wasn't enough room to lock up everyone who our system
says ought to be kept off the street.
It's difficult to express enough outrage at the idea that
we release serial child rapists so that non-violent sellers of
a largely harmless drug can be locked up for 55 years.
Cassell, to his credit, has stayed loyal to the principle
that legislatures, not judges, should make the laws.
But it's yet more to his credit that he doesn't hide his disgust
at the inhuman absurdity of some of those laws, even as he fulfills
his oath to carry them out.
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