Why Law Enforcement Supports Mandatory Minimums
Annonymous commenter on Doug Berman’s post “The safety valve solution to mandatory minimums”:
Isn’t part, and an important part, of the real story behind the motivation of law enforcement figures who so obdurately support mandatory minimums is that it increases their ability to coerce plea bargains?
Seemingly absent from the discussion is the fact that law enforcement supports and indeed requests massively below guideline sentences for its pleader-cooperators. The response that this is a statutory-based departure based on cooperation doesn’t seem particularly compelling given that in so many plea bargains a large down-departure is built into the deal by the prosecutors dropping many charges before settling on the claim(s) to be plead.
This disparity that law enforcement can count on, between the mandatory sentences and what pleaders can expect, gives their already monstrous-plea bargaining power some serious additional oomph.
Bingo.
And to be fair, not all law enforcement supports mandatory minimums.
