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Abolish mandatory minimums.
All mandatory minimums do is remove a range of appropriate sentences and extract guilty pleas. Without them, courts could still sentence people up to the max. More importantly, people would have less fear of forcing the government to prove their guilt.
Does anybody really believe that putting your hand through an open window deserves 3 1/2 years in prison? No, but that's the mandatory minimum in NY for burg 2, which gets charged with those facts routinely.
Four people in a car where a gun is found? Mandatory minimum = 3 1/2. Add in the car presumption, and now a non-jail offer for the three people who were in the car and had nothing to do with the gun might be hard to reject.
Three people in a bar fight where one of them cuts someone with a broken bottle? Cool, let's call that gang assault 1. Mandatory minimum: 5.
And this is all just for people with no prior record at all. Let's say you were convicted of stealing a cell phone nine years ago. Now you're sitting in that same car with a gun in the glove compartment. Your minimum? 5.
I've had three clients convicted after trial. In each case, the jury expected the sentence to be less than the mandatory minimum.
