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Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that he has directed his federal prosecutors to pursue the most severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences, in his first step toward a return to the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in long sentences for many minority defendants and packed U.S. prisons.
[...] In the later years of the Obama administration, a bipartisan consensus emerged on Capitol Hill for sentencing reform legislation, which Sessions opposed and successfully worked to derail.
In a two-page memo to federal prosecutors across the country, Sessions overturned former attorney general Eric H. Holder's sweeping criminal charging policy that instructed his prosecutors to avoid charging certain defendants with offenses that would trigger long mandatory minimum sentences. In its place, Sessions told his more than 5,000 assistant U.S. attorneys to charge defendants with the most serious crimes, carrying the toughest penalties.
More at Washington Post, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Hill
Memorandum on Department Charging and Sentencing Policy - US Department of Justice PDF
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @06:58AM (8 children)
Holder: undermining the will of the legislative branch
Sessions: pressure to plea bargain (giving up right to a trial) and/or racking up the defendant's legal expenses on flimsy cases
The ethical choice is the charge the defendant with the maximum for which there is really solid evidence, then take it to trial. By charging exactly as appropriate, the prosecution should be able to avoid anything underhanded and still win nearly 100% of the time. If the courts get too backed up or the prisons get too full, that is a problem for the legislature.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @07:13AM (7 children)
Holder: undermining the will of the legislative branch
I don't care about the will of the legislative branch, since the federal drug war is 100% unconstitutional to begin with; the Constitution simply does not give the federal government the power to ban drugs. Insane interpretations of the commerce clause are just that: Insane. What Holder did was a microscopic step in the right direction, though obviously it was weak and temporary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @09:08AM (3 children)
Maybe just cut the legislative branch out? The administrative branch can just do whatever is a step in the right direction, congress be damned?
Do you only feel this way when your preferred party occupies the whitehouse, or is that not a consideration? Maybe "it's all good"? We don't even need to pass an Enabling Act, eh? The administration can take Nike's advice: Just Do It.
I don't think this will end well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:46AM
Maybe just cut the legislative branch out? The administrative branch can just do whatever is a step in the right direction, congress be damned?
The is the direction congress has pushed the executive in for the previous 8 years.
One party has been dedicated to proving that government is the problem. They've been very successful.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday May 16 2017, @03:47PM (1 child)
Did you read the comment you're responding to?
The war on (some) drugs is unconstitutional. It is up to the judicial branch to reign in BOTH the legislative and executive branches here. However, the judicial branch has been derelict in that duty, across party lines, and complicit in allowing this flagrant violation of both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution.
Now I know the right-wing authoritarian followers here will want to point out why my detailed legal analysis there in bold is lacking. GP nailed it: the problem is abuse of the commerce clause. I'll add that it's also willful ignorance of the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. It is exactly an “insane interpretation.” Something that does not involve the exchange of the good or service we're talking about and especially not involving that good or service crossing state lines cannot possibly be interstate commerce. Remember, the first attempts at cannabis prohibition were done through taxation.
When people wanted to have alcohol prohibition, they at least understood that it would require a constitutional amendment.
That reminds me. Look at how Obamneycare abused the taxation power to force people to buy a private commercial product. How long until the commerce clause gets abused in the name of welfare for the insurance oligopoly? If using taxation to force you to fork over your hard-earned cash buying “insurance” with deductibles so high that even if you stay in the hospital for a week the policy doesn't even pay out—if that doesn't work, watch for the commerce clause to come into play to force you to buy a product that is available only in your own state for seeking medical care only in your own state.
Want a war on (some) drugs? Want Obamneycare? Get to passing those amendments you need!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Tuesday May 16 2017, @10:55PM
There's nothing of the sort in article III, which is what authorized and instantiated SCOTUS. Or anywhere else in the constitution. In article III, the constitution assigns the judicial power (guilty, innocent, dismissed, the usual) to SCOTUS for a few specialized types of cases, for instance, WRT treaties. It says absolutely nothing about the any power to second-guess the constitution itself. That power is defined in article V, which does not assign any power at all to SCOTUS, but hands it specifically to congress and the legislatures of the (several) states.
Oh, wait. You must be thinking of the powers SCOTUS arrogated unto itself per Marbury v. Madison (1803.) You know, that time when executive and legislative branches failed to rein in the judiciary.
Isn't playing constitutional scholar fun? :)
The problem with the constitution, as I see it, is that it is toothless. There is no punishment whatsoever for government actors who break their oaths to obey the thing, and so, predictably enough, they often don't obey it, their oaths and their honor left in ragged tatters on the bloody floor of history. The blood having dripped from the backs of the citizens whose lives they injure and/or ruin with their unconstitutional malfuckery.
BTW, completely agree: war on drugs is 100% unconstitutional. Also un-American, evil, antisocial, anti-liberty, and self-destructive. Not necessarily in that order.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:15AM (2 children)
I don't care about the will of the legislative branch, since the federal drug war is 100% unconstitutional to begin with
Oh hey, look everyone: it's a constitutional scholar in our midst.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @05:11PM (1 child)
I thought we were all constitutional scholars here?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:07PM
I'm not a constitutional scholar. However, I did read it. Many times over. And the the Federalist Papers, likewise. And a whole bunch of history. And I've thought about these things at length.
Near as I can tell, what the constitutions says, how that relates to what the framers intended, and what the government actually does are very, very far apart.
Every argument I've ever run into that tries to say otherwise founders on a whole bunch of sophist bullshit pretty early on. Things like "among" being interpreted as "amidst", "shall not infringe" as "yay, let's infringe", "probable cause, oath or affirmation, warrant" as "break in and shoot the dog whenever" and "except within 100 miles of the border" and "unless you're trying to get on an aircraft", etc. And of course the completely made-up stuff such as arose from Marbury vs. Madison.
So there's that.
Not sure I'd want to be a constitutional scholar. It seems to be a path straight to the inability to understand the written word, much less go digging for the contemporaneous meaning of what was written so, you know, the thing could be applied as intended.