It Came From Outside the Legal System

The Horror Story called Mandatory Sentencing

An innocent campfire story leaves five Americans fearing for their constitutional rights

I know a good horror story.




No! Don't let BRIAN tell a horror story!




And why not? Everybody else sitting around this campfire has told a horror story tonight.





Yeah, Charles, what's wrong? Let the man tell a story.



Frank, Sally and Diane: Yeah, yeah!




Okay, okay: but don't say I didn't warn you.




Now then, if I may begin...




Come on, Brian, let's get it over with.




First of all, I'd like to preface my story with a big thank you to Frank Galloway and his lovely wife Sally Steadman-Galloway here for setting up this trip to the Alaska wilderness.




Just get on with it, would you?




I'd like to thank Pilot Bob Rivers in absentia for dropping us off here earlier this afternoon in his Cessna float plane.




I'll let him know you said so: he'll be pleased, I'm sure.




And thank you, Frank, for letting me bring that technically extra carton of Dinty Moore stew. Since we're all here in one piece, it's obvious that that one little extra box did NOT -- I repeat: did NOT -- overload the plane as certain worrywarts around here had suggested that it was going to do.




Oh, please.




But don't worry: Even though the Rivers-meister won't be back here to pick us up -- or what's left of us, anyway -- for one whole week...



All: Oooooh!




I'm sure that very few, if any, of us are going to die a horrid death out here in the meantime.




Horrid death? What are you talking about?




Well, I recently saw a '70s move called 'Creeper' wherein a group of greenhorns just like ourselves went camping in the Alaska wilderness only to be summarily butchered by an Eskimo veteran of World War II.




Oh, dear.




I kid you not. You see, one member of the party had botched a surgical operation on this guy some years back and now the disgruntled Eskimo was out to "get his own back" -- in spades -- amid the topographically diverse but routinely hostile environment called the Alaskan outback.




Oh, dear. You're not going to tell a story about that Eskimo, are you?




Nah. True, I was thinking of telling you guys a similar story, since for all we know, a livid hillbilly with a giant axe COULD be watching us at this very moment, waiting to kill us all thanks to some surgical operation that one of us bungled years back.




What a horrible thought.




But then I got to thinking...




Oh, no, that's never good.




None of us are surgeons, are we?! You, Sally?




Last time I checked, I earn my money selling tastefully painted miniatures of family canines.




Well, bow-wow-wow-wow to you, Sally.




Shut up, Charles.




Tastefully painted miniatures, indeed.




And how about you, Frank?




I just sell medical insurance: I leave it up to the doctors to butcher the patients.




Diane?




I'm a school teacher, Brian, remember: 11th Grade, Wickham High: Go, Wildcats! Go! Whoo-whoo!




Indeed. And since Charles here is a Wall Street trader, it's a safe bet that the only thing that he ever botches are his clients' trades!








Hey, I'm not a Wall Street, trader, Brian: I'm a assistant District Attorney for the State of Arizona. You know that!




I know, Charles, but I was desperate to find a pretext to slam Wall Street traders, so I was hoping (in vain, as it turns out) that you would turn a deaf ear to my on-purpose gaffe.




See, guys: Brian is never going to get to his story!




Relax, Charles: I just wanted to establish the fact that we're probably not all going to be slaughtered tonight by a vengeful Eskimo who would skewer our heads on top of a series of tall, prominently placed aspen pikes as a warning to future surgeons to stop botching medical operations.




Oh, thank you very much, Brian. How comforting.




Mind you, the story I'm about to tell is almost as scary as that, though...




Oh, dear!




So relax, folks, and kick back (as far as possible, that is) on these somewhat wobbly logs (whooo!), as I tell a little story called (drum roll, please, maestro...)








The Horror of the Mandatory Sentencing!







All: WHAT????




I'm not gonna say I told you so, guys, but I told you so!




Once upon a time, there was a kingdom that was governed by the rule of law, where judges made decisions based on the merits of an individual case.




Oh, this is ridiculous!




Gather around close to the fire, folks, because this story becomes real scary, real fast!




No, Brian, please!




What's wrong, Diane?




I think I know where he's going with this and it's a truly horrifying story if I remember rightly.




Heh heh heh! Yes, Diane, it is a trifle creepy at that, isn't it? Heh heh heh!




Ooh, now Brian's beginning to scare ME, too.




It's scary, all right, Sally, because guess what happened next?




W-what?




The rule of law in this kingdom was eventually chased out of court by a pack of well-meaning but misguided "victims lobbyists" who sought (via mandatory sentencing) to pre-script the entire legal system in such a way as to prevent the recurrence of the one specific (often atypical) crime that had shattered their own lives...




What?




even though by so doing they were denying all future suspects the right to a fair trial based on the facts and the mitigating circumstances of their own often radically different case.




Hey, now!




Thus sending the prison population in this particular kingdom to record heights and proving (at the cost of thousands of once-productive lives) the maxim that "tough cases make bad law."




So this is a horror story, Brian?




You betcha.




It sounds more like an oped piece against mandatory sentencing in the American legal system.




But mandatory sentencing IS a horror story, Charles!




How so?




Don't you see? If a bad guy happens to sneeze during the commission of a particularly despicable crime that raises the hackles of the victims' groups, then everybody who sneezes during the commission of any future crime will henceforth be languishing in jail based on a mandatory law predicated on the circumstances of the original case, never mind the fact that mitigating circumstances often render the new case dramatically different, morally speaking, from the original nightmare case.



Frank, Sally and Diane: AAaaaaaagh!




Wow, Brian, I've got to hand it to you: that is one scary story you just told us!




You're telling me! It gives me the creeps to think that the legal system of an ostensibly free country could devolve like that into a petty post facto emotional payback scheme for crime victims of the past.




Um, excuse me.



All: Yes?




I'm a prosecutor, remember? I make my living sending people to jail forever using mandatory sentences based on horrible cases that have little or nothing to do with the case at hand.



All: Oh...




Oh, come on, that doesn't count as a horror story, Brian! Tell a real horror story!




Oh, very well. Ahem. Once upon a time, there were four greenhorns in the Alaska wilderness sitting around a campfire, not unlike the one that, even now, snaps, crackles and pops here before us.







Little did they know, however, that they were being watched at that very moment by a big disgruntled eskimo on whom one of their party had performed a botched surgical operation back in World War II!



All: Aaaaaaah!




Okay, okay: I changed my mind, Brian: Mandatory sentencing definitely counts as a horror story, okay? Jeez. I'll see if I can't do something about it when I get back to Phoenix, okay? I mean, jeepers now!



All: Yay!




Now let's get some shut-eye, shall we?




Willingly.




Unfortunately, all I can think about now is some livid Eskimo waiting in the wings for me with an axe.




Don't worry, Charles: If you're slaughtered in that fashion during the coming week, we will pursue the most vigorous charges possible against the Eskimo in question when we get back to Phoenix.




What a comfort!




Just don't expect us to follow up your killer's trial by starting up a nationwide campaign to pass Charles' Law: a bill to give a mandatory life sentence to anyone who ever commits a crime while holding an axe!

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