Herald News: Mandatory sentences too restrictive

10-9-2012 New Jersey:

SEXUAL ABUSE of children is abhorrent. Under current state law, a person found guilty of the aggravated sexual assault of a child faces a maximum prison term of 20 years.

A bill that just sailed through the state Senate would, among other things, increase the maximum to between 25 years and life. There's nothing wrong with that. But another thing the bill would do is to make a 25-year sentence mandatory. No longer would judges have discretion. That would be a mistake and would produce a number of unintended consequences.

The Assembly should think twice before adopting the Senate's bill. We understand that would not be easy. No legislator wants to be portrayed as "soft" on crime, especially one as horrible as child sex abuse. Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon our elected representatives to think about all consequences of the bills that come before them.

It's without dispute that the bill in question deals with a repugnant offense. It is named the Jessica Lunsford Act in memory of a 9-year-old Florida girl who was abducted, raped and murdered in 2005 by a repeated sex offender. Since her killing, 46 states have passed laws imposing new and harsher sentences for many sex crimes.

Our problem is not with putting sex offenders behind bars for many years; it's with imposing a mandatory sentence and taking the matter out of the hands of prosecutors and judges. All sexual assault offenses are reprehensible, but they all aren't the same. Some involve abductions. Others take place in the home among people related to each other and some involve children abusing other children. None of those conditions justify sexual assaults, but they are factors that should be considered during sentencing.

The underlining philosophy behind mandatory sentencing is a wholly subjective belief that judges can't be trusted to send the "bad guys" away for a long time. That perception prompted state and federal lawmakers to adopt mandatory penalties for drug offenses in the 1980s during the height of the so-called "war on drugs." Now many of those laws are being reviewed and changed on both the federal and state levels. In New Jersey, in fact, Governor Christie is going in the opposite direction as a champion of sending ...continued... Opinion of Herald News