Author Archives: Will Brownsberger

The legislature is considering directions for criminal justice reform. Check out the background we have been assembling. Help us with additional information.

Illegal drug use spreads through all racial and ethnic groups and whites are the group most commonly convicted of possession (70.9% in Fiscal 2013). The racial disproportionality at the mandatory minimum level is therefore troubling, especially because of the unique role of prosecutorial discretion in bringing and enforcing mandatory minimum charges.

In testimony before the Judiciary Committee in on June 9, 2015, witnesses offered differing predictions of the likely impact of repealing mandatories. We are left with irreducible uncertainty as to the expected change in sentence levels. It seems certain that some particular cases will be resolved differently, but hard to imagine that average sentence levels will completely collapse.

School zone charges are dropped in over 95% of the cases in which they are charged. The extraordinarily high statewide dismissal rate for the school zone charge argues for its final elimination — it has very limited and therefore potentially arbitrary effect.

The 2012 reductions — to the school zone, the second offense penalties and the trafficking penalties — reduced the population of drug offenders in the state prison and the Houses of Correction, now at roughly 15% at both levels. Even without further legislative action, the population could drift down further, but that is not certain.

In thinking about the consequences of repealing mandatory minimums, it is important to recognize that the longest sentences, where the greatest injustices can theoretically occur, are rare. The likely outcome change resulting from shifting power from the prosecutor to the sentencing judge by repealing mandatory minimums is therefore more limited than one might infer from the most egregious examples.