Lee
Carroll Brooker, a 75-year-old disabled veteran suffering from chronic
pain, was arrested in July 2011 for growing three dozen marijuana plants
for his own medicinal use behind his son’s house in Dothan, Ala., where
he lived. For this crime, Mr. Brooker was given a life sentence with no
possibility of release.
Alabama
law mandates that anyone with certain prior felony convictions be
sentenced to life without parole for possessing more than 1 kilogram, or
2.2 pounds, of marijuana, regardless of intent to sell.
Mr. Brooker had
been convicted of armed robberies in Florida two decades earlier, for
which he served 10 years. The marijuana plants collected at his son’s
house — including unusable parts like vines and stalks — weighed 2.8
pounds.
At
his sentencing, the trial judge told Mr. Brooker that if he “could
sentence you to a term that is less than life without parole, I would.”
Last year, Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, called
Mr. Brooker’s sentence “excessive and unjustified,” and said it
revealed “grave flaws” in the state’s sentencing laws, but the court
still upheld the punishment.
On
Friday, the United States Supreme Court will consider whether to hear
Mr. Brooker’s challenge to his sentence, which he argues violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. The justices should take the case and overturn this sentence.
Life
without parole, second only to the death penalty in severity, should
never be a mandatory sentence for any crime, much less for simple
possession of marijuana, which is not even a crime in many parts of the
country. If this punishment is ever meted out, it should be by a judge
who has carefully weighed the individual circumstances of a case.
Besides
Alabama, only South Dakota, Louisiana and Mississippi have such laws;
in Mississippi, possession of barely one ounce of marijuana is enough to
trigger a mandatory sentence of life without parole for someone with
prior convictions for certain felonies. Almost everywhere else, public attitudes
and policy toward drugs in general, and marijuana in particular, have
changed significantly.
Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana,
and four states, along with D.C., have fully legalized its possession
for recreational use. In most states, the maximum sentence for
possessing less than three pounds of marijuana is at most five years.
In
other words, Mr. Brooker’s punishment for marijuana possession is the
definition of cruel and unusual. He received a punishment typically
reserved for the most violent crimes, like murder, rape and terrorism,
even though he poses no threat to society. The trial court even allowed
him to remain free while he awaited his sentencing.
In 1991, the Supreme Court upheld a state law
that mandated life without parole for possession of less than one and a
half pounds of cocaine. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who concurred in that
opinion, has since spoken out
on the scourge of mandatory minimum sentences, which he said are often
“unwise and unjust,” and represent a “misguided” transfer of power from
judges to prosecutors.
The court has already banned mandatory death sentences and mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles,
both on the grounds that the Eighth Amendment must adapt to the
“evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing
society.” By that standard, and given rapidly evolving public opinion on
marijuana, no one should be sent to prison forever for possessing a
small amount of marijuana for medical or personal use.
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