Six and a half years ago, I drove out to Lompoc federal penitentiary in the hills outside Santa Barbara to interview Weldon Angelos, a young man who had received the improbable sentence of fifty-five years without parole for selling marijuana, ostensibly while carrying a small pistol in an ankle holster.
another extreme sentence of a person of color, not condoning the crime but white murders don't get as much time. i their eyes it take another ethnic off the street permanently decreasing the population, but they are countering their own effort by abortion laws, meet the new majority.
A rap artist from Salt Lake City and friend to Napoleon and other eminences of the hip-hop world, Angelos had been ensnared by an informant in a series of undercover marijuana purchases that reeked of entrapment. What might have been a two-bit state pot case became a high-stakes federal case.
When Angelos—who denied carrying a gun when dealing—refused to enter a guilty plea, the feds played hardball, piling more indictments onto the original charge. In December 2003, more than a year after he had been arrested, Angelos was found guilty on several counts, though he was acquitted on others. Because of mandatory minimum statutes linked to the firearms charges, the presiding judge—a George W. Bush appointee named Paul Cassell—was left with no discretion at sentencing.
After asking the prosecuting and defense attorneys to advise him on the constitutionality of the sentence, a distraught Cassell handed down the fifty-five-year term, a punishment he called “unjust, cruel and even irrational.” In his opinion, he urged then-President Bush to pardon the young father of three and right a clear judicial wrong.asking for advice from opposing attorneys? was this another Katrina Brownie appt. someone totally inept at their handed to them job.
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/10/30/1110901/bush-fema-director-katrina-hits-obama-sandy/?mobile=nc
the hypocrisy of idiocy.
