JUDGES NEED DISCRETION

A major reason the United States has more people in prison than any other
civilized nation in the world stems from our self-described "law and order"
politicians, who have taken away judicial discretion and replaced it with
arbitrary sentencing guidelines, some of them mandatory.

The feds, for example, require a minimum of five years imprisonment for
anyone caught growing 100 or more marijuana plants. Any mitigating
circumstances don't matter. It's five years in the slammer regardless of
whether a person was growing the weed to help ease the nausea that comes
from chemotherapy treatments or he's a drug dealer growing it to sell in
the inner city.

Here in Wisconsin, legislators have also come up with similar mandatory
sentences for crimes, tying the hands of judges. The result is that our
prisons and county jails are overflowing and the cost to taxpayers is
approaching the obscene. And to top it all off, there hasn't been any
appreciable decline in the crime rate.

With that as a backdrop, one might expect that our leaders would start
rethinking the old law and order strategy that has led us to this point.

But that would be too logical.

Our country's chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General John
Ashcroft, has now come up with a cockamamie scheme to monitor and report
judges who might not always follow strict federal guidelines. The
implication is that Ashcroft, when he isn't throwing people in jail and
denying them any semblance of due process, would then work to undo those
judges' audacity by appealing to a harder-core court.

Not surprisingly, another of the country's least enlightened politicos,
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is going to help Ashcroft keep
track of these "sissy" judges by forming a watchdog group.

Both of these guys have had a history of judicial bashing, notwithstanding
the Constitution's strict separation of powers to guard the independence of
the courts.

But what's worse is that they have the power to get away with it.