There are two failures here — the first we can pin on the legislators who put mandatory minimums in place and scrunched much of the discretion out of drug sentencing. The drug laws impute trafficking intent from quantity, and they do not adequately distinguish between use and abuse. The fact that potential criminal liability had doctors running scared of prescribing pain-control meds for this guy is alarming as well. Put aside for a minute that the penalties are draconian — when these laws prevent doctors from legally prescribing drugs to people who need them, you've got a big problem.

The second failure is prosecutorial discretion. The state gets to pick and choose whom it will prosecute under the law. Do you think Rush Limbaugh will be charged in Florida with offenses that mandate serious jail time? This isn't even a case where prosecutors put the screws to a less culpable defendant because he wouldn't rat out someone further up the chain of distribution. When I first read the post I suspected this kind of motive, but the state can't even claim that.

The prosecutor's fault attribution is asinine. That's like playing chicken with someone, crashing his car and killing him, then saying it's his fault because he didn't get out of the way.

I could go on for pages about the stupidity of the war on drugs, which we seem to have no hope of quitting (why is it that the War on Poverty is the only war our government has decided to suspend fighting?). It's excessive and irrational, as you have explained. It's often unjust and inequitable to the point of racist (see the disproportionate sentencing exposures for comparable quantities of crack and powder cocaine), and it's arguably self-perpetuating and counterproductive. I had stats somewhere on the number of inner-city black men currently in prison on drug charges; the numbers were astronomically high, and the article that housed them made a good point that taking the adult males out of inner cities is not the best way to protect these populations. I'll have to dig up the reference.

I don't know if you saw the West Wing episode where Pres. Bartlett issued pardons to persons screwed over by mandatory minimums. Pretty far-fetched, but I like it. Dubya says he's committed to transitioning ex-cons back into society. Somebody should pass the word to his U.S. Attorney here in Massachusetts, who has adopted a practice requiring his prosecutors to charge the maximum in all cases unless he personally signs off on lesser charges. We had a case where a kid on Oxycontin drove the getaway car in a bank robbery. In the year before the feds identified him as a suspect, he had detoxed, rehabbed, taken a job, enrolled in school, and was volunteering his time lecturing high school kids on the perils of drug abuse — not from anything the government had done, but on his own initiative. The kid pleaded guilty, and the Sentencing Guidelines had him on the hook for a one-year prison term for his particular offense conduct. My judge departed down to probation on the ground of extraordinary rehabilitation — and because sending a recovering addict to prison risked undoing all the good the kid had done for himself. And there was the government, insisting on that one-year term. It has since appealed the judgment, presumably because it makes their job harder to have a decision on the books that supports (gasp!) departing from the Guidelines.

It's just pathetic.