THE TWIN CRUSADES AGAINST DRUGS AND GUNS AMERICANS ARE SUFFERING THE "UNJUST, CRUEL, AND EVEN IRRATIONAL" CONSEQUENCES OF THE WARS ON INTOXICANTS AND FIREARMS.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob

WELDON ANGELOS GREW up in a musical family. His father, a Greek immigrant, aspired to be a country singer, while relatives on his mother's side were jazz and country musicians. Angelos' tastes were somewhat different: By his early 20s, he had gotten a start as a rap producer.

Angelos had collaborated with well-known hip-hop artists, including Snoop Dogg. He had his own label in Salt Lake City, Extravagant Records. To supplement his income and support his two young children, Angelos also sold marijuana, which is how he ended up with a 55-year federal prison sentence.

That jaw-dropping punishment, demanded by a statute aimed at armed drug dealers, starkly illustrates how drug and gun laws interact to produce results that make a mockery of justice. In vainly striving to control inanimate objects they associate with disorder and violence, legislators create penalties that send human beings to prison for years, decades, and sometimes the rest of their lives. The combination of these twin crusades, both of which punish conduct that violates no one's rights, is potent enough to override anything that stands in their way, including decency, proportionality, and respect for civil liberties.

'UNJUST, CRUEL, AND EVEN IRRATIONAL'

ANGELOS WAS NOT exactly a cannabis kingpin. His 2002 arrest was based on three eight-ounce sales to a childhood acquaintance who had become a police informant. The proceeds totaled about $1,000. But Angelos also owned handguns, and the informant said he had seen one during the first two pot sales--once near the center console of Angelos' car and once in an ankle holster. Police found three handguns when they searched Angelos' apartment. Although he had no prior convictions and had never threatened or injured anyone with a gun, those firearms were enough to trigger a federal law that prescribed mandatory minimum sentences for possessing a firearm "in furtherance of" drug trafficking.

The first such offense carried a five-year mandatory minimum, which rose to 25 years for each subsequent offense, with all sentences to be served consecutively. A jury convicted Angelos of three gun charges--one for each marijuana sale--along with various drug and money laundering charges. So even apart from those other charges, Angelos was looking at a sentence that would keep him in prison until he was an old man, assuming he survived that long. The mandatory minimum was nearly four times as long as the 15-year sentence that prosecutors had proposed in a plea offer that Angelos rejected.

U.S. District Judge Paul G. Cassell marveled at that situation when he sentenced Angelos, then 25, in 2004. "For these three acts of possessing (not using or even displaying) these guns, the government insists that Mr. Angelos should essentially spend the rest of his life in prison," Cassell wrote. "Specifically, the government urges the court to sentence Mr. Angelos to a prison term of no less than 61 1/2 years--six years and a half (or more) for drug dealing followed by 55 years for three counts of possessing a firearm in connection with a drug offense."

In light of the severe mandatory penalty, Cassell sentenced Angelos to one day for all the other charges. But he had no choice about imposing the 55-year sentence, which he called "unjust, cruel, and even irrational." Cassell noted that it was "far in excess of the sentence imposed for such serious crimes as aircraft hijacking, second-degree murder, espionage, kidnapping, aggravated assault, and rape." He urged then-President George W. Bush to "commute Mr. Angelos' sentence to something that is more in accord with just and rational punishment."

On appeal, Angelos argued that his sentence violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment, a claim that Cassell had rejected. A group of former federal judges, attorneys general, and Justice Department officials agreed with Angelos, filing their own brief to that effect. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit was unimpressed.

The Eighth Amendment "forbids only extreme sentences that are 'grossly disproportionate' to the crime," the 10th Circuit noted. Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected Eighth Amendment challenges to sentences ranging from 25 years to life for seemingly minor crimes under drug laws and recidivist statutes. Those cases demonstrated that "the gross disproportionality principle reserves a constitutional violation for only the extraordinary case," as the Supreme Court had recently put it.

"Applying these principles to the case at hand," the appeals court said, "we conclude that this is not an 'extraordinary' case in which the sentences at issue are 'grossly disproportionate' to the crimes for which they were imposed." To back up that conclusion, the 10th Circuit noted that the Supreme Court had said the "basic purpose" of the statute that generated Angelos' 55-year sentence was "to combat the 'dangerous combination' of 'drugs and guns.'"

According to the congressman who wrote the original version of that provision, which was incorporated into the Gun Control Act of 1968, the idea was "to persuade the man who is tempted to commit a Federal felony to leave his gun at home." But even a defendant who left his gun at home could still face the statute's draconian penalties if he also kept drugs or drug money there.

The jury that convicted Angelos, the 10th Circuit noted, found that he not only "possessed a handgun during the course of the first two controlled purchases" but also "possessed firearms at his apartment in conjunction with drug-trafficking materials." The appeals court added that "all of these firearms appear to have facilitated his drug trafficking by, if nothing else, providing protection from purchasers and others."

'ENTIRELY RATIONAL'

TWELVE YEARS AFTER Angelos was sentenced, federal prosecutors pursued similar gun charges against medical marijuana growers in Kettle Falls, Washington, citing the firearms that two of the defendants kept in their home. In that case, the jurors rejected the firearm charges, perhaps because they did not view gun ownership, which is common in northeastern Washington, in the same sinister light as the prosecution did.

The 10th Circuit, by contrast, had no trouble accepting the premise that Angelos' guns made his crimes much worse. It emphasized that the Supreme Court had deemed it "entirely rational for Congress to penalize the mere presence of a firearm during a drug transaction." As the justices saw it, it did not matter "whether guns are used as the medium of exchange for drugs sold illegally or as a means to protect the transaction or dealers." Either way, "their introduction into the scene of drug transactions dramatically heightens the danger to society."

In Angelos' case, the 10th Circuit averred, "his possession of the firearms clearly heightened the threat of danger to society." It "undoubtedly increased the likelihood of violence occurring to neighbors in and around the residences where the firearms were maintained, as well as to others that happened to be in the vicinity of wherever he chose to conduct his drug transactions."

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