I sent plenty of people to prison during my career as a judge. Now I’m working to get one man out, and not because I think he’s innocent.
I participated in hundreds of sentencing hearings in my 44-year career as a prosecutor and as a judge.
Most of the sentences imposed were within the range I thought reasonable given the crime committed and the defendant’s background.
Occasionally, the law mandated an excessive sentence, which I had to impose.
By far the most egregious example of an excessive mandated sentence that I was ever required to impose came in 2007. The defendant, Carl Ray Buske, was a 47-year-old aviation mechanic with no criminal record other than a 15-year-old conviction for drug possession.
His offense: the possession of 29 printed images of child pornography.
I was required to sentence him to 290 years
Buske did not create the images, sell them or even share the images with anyone.
Yet Arizona law required that his sentence be not less than 10 years for each image, with each sentence to be consecutive to the others — that is, one stacked on top of the other — for a total of 290 years in prison.
Like most people, I abhor child pornography. The possession of such images should be illegal and severely punished.
However, one of the guiding principles of our criminal justice system is that the punishment should be proportionate to and commensurate with the crime.
A sentence of 290 years in prison (a life sentence, in effect) for this conduct is not only disproportionate, it’s unconscionable.
No, it shouldn’t be punished this severely. In Germany the worst punishment anyone could possibly get for this offense is 5 years in prison. America has entered an era of fascism, and this is proof.
This is a great article, thanks for posting it. A lot to process here.
10 years for second-degree murder…lifetime for what amounts to viewing pictures. Insanity. The US has completely lost its marbles, and the only people who seem to care anymore, are the ones with the least power to do anything about it.
The courts are a joke, the poor sods who can’t buy off/game the system are the punchline, judges are puppets while prosecuters and politicians pull their strings, and the general public are the peanut gallery wildly celebrating this whole sadistic show, believing that they will never personally be a part of it (until they are).
I believe there was once a time when many would have considered so much as 5 years excessive, even for some of the most egregious crimes. Now, that is the standard/minimum for any offense involving the word “sex” in it, and one should be so “lucky” as to only spend a quarter of their life in some merciless for-profit cesspit and still emerge intact and lucid enough to participate in society (if they are even allowed the “privilage” of doing so…which, let’s be honest here, most of us aren’t).
The fact that this judge was basically forced to slam someone with such a demented sentence tells us all we need to know about exactly what kind of nation this has become, and it’s only going to keep getting worse from here on out.
That’s some scary sh*t. They got a MM possession law in Wisconsin. I heard cats been getting 3 years, not as bad as 10 yrs in AZ, but still 3 is too much for never touching a child. I served less than half that time for statutory rape. Them Arizona politicians and our Wisconsin politicians must be smoking dope together.
While I agree wholeheartedly with the article and the comments here (again, a damn shame there wasn’t a comment block on the host article), I still get frustrated that it isn’t until they retire that some judges see the lunacy that the registry has become.
A key quote here, with a statistic I was unaware of:
That contact part is key–as I’ve said before, what people fear from most PFRs is not recidivism, but ESCALATION, because most PFRs did not commit a crime that actually seriously impacted their communities. If only 1.3% of a population–a male-dominated population of people who have shown some difficulty following the letter of the law–is committing a hands-on offense, that is INCREDIBLY REMARKABLE. I’m guessing that might be lower than the rate of hands-on sex offenses by men of similar ages who committed non-sex offenses; that is to say, not only are men convicted of non-sexual offenses at more at risk of offending against their communities than PFRs, they also might be more at risk of committing hands-on sexual offenses than many categories of PFRs, including those with CP convictions. Either way, there is zero evidence these men are risky to anyone.
This shouldn’t be surprising. I’d assume men who read spy novels are less likely to be spies than men who don’t read at all, men who obsess over sports statistics are pretty unlikely to be athletes–people who are talking about or watching people do things on the Internet are doing it because, more often than not, they’re NOT doing these things in real life, and they’re not going to. I’m not saying any of these things are moral, but simply describing the level of risk they pose to communities is quite low.