Our elected representatives passed a law requiring a minimum sentence for a particular crime. What, exactly, is your rationale for having a judge ignore this law and sentence according to his whim?
Are you willing to have this same rationale applied to all minimum sentencing laws by every judge?
I agree with the judge, they should have never been charged under that dubious statute. I only fault the judge for not throwing the case out, if he could have done so.
You seem to start from the perspective that the heavy hand of the FedGov is a desirable thing.
I start from the presumption these are good folks who did nothing wrong. The FedGov has been squeezing them for a long time.
Do you live a friggin' apartment?
The government is criminals.
They gave Lois Lerner a pass on MULTIPLE FELONIES. So, there's discretion there.
If you're a "law and order" type, you need to examine the out-of-control freight train that is our legal corpus.
There are so many laws that Our Masters can pick and choose which ones they're going to apply, if we cross one of The Masters.
Remember Linda Tripp? And that was 15 years ago.
Our Masters have been busy.
One of my favorite anecdotes was the guy sitting outside the Web cafe, using their WiFi on his lunch hour.
Somebody whined, and a cop showed up, and asked him what he was doing.
He told the cop, and was not arrested.
However, the cop went back to the cop shop, sat down with the local persecutor, and they went over The Big Book of Laws till they found something they could get him on.
The cop then went back and proudly arrested the guy...
C’mon, man, you can’t expect anyone here to understand and take account of facts, right? Knee-jerk reactions are always the order of the day, get with the program!
There’s certainly a case to be made for no prosecution at all, but it WAS prosecuted, so that’s moot.
Convictions were the result and the federal district judge tried to exercise some discretion to make the punishments fit the crimes. Good trick when the law says 5 years minimum, period. Sometimes even federal judges can’t do what they think is justice, they’re subject to appellate review.
As you and I know, prosecutors can never appeal a not-guilty verdict, but they can certainly always appeal a sentence. And so a political hack did. And she won, as she should have, the original sentences were contrary to law.
Anyone who wasn’t a political hack wouldn’t have bothered to appeal the sentences, but she was a hack and she did appeal and won so that’s moot, too.
None of this may be “fair” but all of it was certainly entirely legal.
People don’t like that? They need to change the law and/or who is carrying it out and enforcing it on federal courts.
It’s actually funny that some are yapping about “double jeopardy.” Nobody was tried twice, they didn’t need to be, they were convicted the first time around.
Post-conviction issues like an appeal of the sentence or any other appeals (usually by the convicted individual, not the prosecution) have nothing to do with “double jeopardy.”
People who don’t know whereof they speak don’t know that and insist on spouting off as newly-minted lawyers in their own minds.
In any case, complaining about it here accomplishes absolutely nothing.
The people occupying the federal facility should just go home, they’ve made their point, such as it is. They’ve drawn attention to the whole deal. Beyond that, they have no support in any law and they know it, or should.
There’s nothing else good that can result if they persist.