Prison for poor addicts. Offers for rich criminals. Twisted ‘justice’

It was clear that Judge Roy Dalton had had enough.

The case before him involved a homeless drug addict who had accepted $30 from a man he didn’t know to get on his bicycle and deliver a package of drugs.

Was it bad? Absolutely. But Kaream Moore wasn’t a drug dealer. He also had no history of being one. He was an impoverished street dweller and decades-long drug user who would have done almost anything for a few dollars. And the guy he gave the package to was actually a confidential informant working for the government.

On the guilt scale, Moore was on the lowest rung: a victim of drug trafficking rather than a profiteer.

Dalton believed Moore needed a punishment that focused on rehabilitation. But because of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines drawn up by Congress, the judge had to send Moore to prison for five years.

It was a phrase Dalton knew wouldn’t do Moore (or the taxpayers) any good.

So the normally restrained federal judge from Orlando, who his friends call “Skip” and used to be a law partner and attorney for former U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, made it clear that this wasn’t any sane person’s version of justice.

“Mr. Moore needs substance abuse treatment, not a long and destructive prison sentence,” Dalton wrote in his Dec. 6 order. “But Mr. Moore is invisible in our society and our criminal justice system. He has no home and we will not miss it. Just an obstacle on the highway of judicial efficiency.”

Dalton went on to say that taxpayers would now spend $30,000 a year housing, feeding and caring for Moore, who would likely leave prison no better equipped to handle his addiction than when he entered.

And Dalton scoffed at the idea of ​​deterrence. “Will another drug addict refuse the safe dose that a $30 shipment can buy because of Mr. Moore’s draconian sentence?” he postulated. “Make me skeptical.”

This is a problem with mandatory minimums. They do not allow punishments that actually solve problems and deter crime.

The biggest problem in my opinion is that they are not applied equally.

After all, mandatory minimums only apply if a case reaches a judge. Deals are often closed beforehand. And the results are, as expected, inequitable.

The poor man on the street gets the book thrown at him while the rich CEO caught stealing from taxpayers gets a deal. Just like the politician caught breaking the law. And the rich kid from high school was caught handing out drugs at parties.

Politicians who beat their chests that mandatory minimums mean they’re supposedly tough on crime express no sympathy for commoners like Kaream Moore, but they hope cases involving their friends, colleagues and children won’t be looked at too closely. that never end. earning prison time because their cases never go that far.

The scales of justice tilt favorably toward deep-pocketed defendants who can afford an army of lawyers.

You’ve read the stories. We had three people in Central Florida caught up in a “ghost candidates” scandal where prosecutors said they all broke the law, but none of them went to prison.

Florida is also plagued by executives who stole from you, the American taxpayer: hospitals and healthcare companies in St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Orlando accused of stealing millions, sometimes to help CEOs earn big bonuses. However, how many of those people do you think were ordered to spend five years behind bars? Be real. Most didn’t even have to pay back all the money the feds said they stole. Just a few cents on the dollar.

Rick Scott oversaw a company involved in what the feds say was one of the biggest taxpayer frauds in U.S. history and became governor and then U.S. senator.

The Greek fable Aesop once said, “We hang small thieves and appoint great ones to public office.”

Then there is the opioid crisis, the deadly plague in which Moore found himself embroiled. The government says this country’s pharmaceutical companies started the crisis by lying about drugs and breaking the law to get unsuspecting Americans addicted. However, how many of them Did you spend time behind bars?

They skate while Moore goes to prison for making a $30 bicycle delivery. Tell me that’s “justice.”

Dalton said he believed Moore deserved to be punished. He called fentanyl a “scourge” and noted that he has not hesitated to sentence traffickers to long prison terms. But he called Moore’s case one of the worst excessive sentencing cases he has ever been involved with.

Dalton said the prosecution, led by U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida Roger Handberg“went significantly overboard” in seeking a sentence “so unfair and so inappropriate and so exaggerated… that I am somewhat flabbergasted by the Government’s prosecution.”

Again, it’s the kind of prosecutorial zeal we don’t always see in wealthy white-collar criminals.

There is a chance that Handberg, who has done solid work, including the complicated prosecution of Joel Greenberg and whose rise to the top local job I defended years ago, you might reconsider this case and the settlement. It certainly should.

As Moore’s attorney, Fritz Scheller, said in his sentencing memorandum, this five-year sentence “is the product of a flawed legal regime… a unique scheme that indiscriminately imposes long sentences on offenders, regardless of their guilt. “It does not promote respect for the law.”

Judge Dalton deserves credit for speaking out. And, perhaps most importantly, for taking the time to study this case, rather than simply shuffling it into your file.

In fact, the real way to achieve better justice is to have more judges, more prosecutors, and more public defenders working in our overwhelmed and insufficient judicial system. Not applying simplistic sentence schemes to complex problems. And certainly not by throwing the book at low-level messengers while many bigwigs aren’t even charged.

Scott Maxwell is the metro columnist for the Orlando Sentinel.

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