Osler's Razor

One amazing thing I have found in my academic life is that so many of my heroes become my collaborators. Bill Underwood, Randall O'Brien, Hulitt Gloer, Susan Stabile… I am fortunate in many ways, and this is one of the most important.

One of those hero/collaborators has been Judge Mark W. Bennett of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, who was the subject of an exceptional profile by Eli Saslow in the Washington Post this past Sunday.

I first heard from Judge Bennett the day that the Supreme Court ruled in our favor in Spears v. United States. It was Judge Bennett's opinion we were able to have reinstated; the Court said that he could, in fact "categorically reject" the federal sentencing guidelines' 100-to-1 ratio between powder and crack cocaine for sentencing purposes. He sent an email within a few moments of the opinion's announcement. I printed it out and put it in a folder marked "Bennett email" and put that folder in the top drawer of my desk. Later, we appeared together on academic panels, and co-authored a law review article about the roots of over-incarceration (you can download that here).

Saslow explains better than I can why I so admire Judge Bennett, who does the very hard work of seeing the people he sentences and emotionally engaged with the lives he judges:

And now it was another Tuesday in Sioux City — five hearings listed on his docket, five more nonviolent offenders whose cases involved mandatory minimums of anywhere from five to 20 years without the possibility of release. Here in the methamphetamine corridor of middle America, Bennett averaged seven times as many cases each year as a federal judge in New York City or Washington. He had sentenced two convicted murderers to death and several drug cartel bosses to life in prison, but many of his defendants were addicts who had become middling dealers, people who sometimes sounded to him less like perpetrators than victims in the case reports now piled high on his bench. “History of family addiction.” “Mild mental retardation.” “PTSD after suffering multiple rapes.” “Victim of sexual abuse.” “Temporarily homeless.” “Heavy user since age 14.”

Bennett tried to forget the details of each case as soon as he issued a sentence. “You either drain the bathtub, or the guilt and sadness just overwhelms you,” he said once, in his chambers, but what he couldn’t forget was the total, more than 1,100 nonviolent offenders and counting to whom he had given mandatory minimum sentences he often considered unjust. That meant more than $200 million in taxpayer money he thought had been misspent. It meant a generation of rural Iowa drug addicts he had institutionalized. So he had begun traveling to dozens of prisons across the country to visit people he had sentenced, answering their legal questions and accompanying them to drug treatment classes, because if he couldn’t always fulfill his intention of justice from the bench, then at least he could offer empathy. He could look at defendants during their sentencing hearings and give them the dignity of saying exactly what he thought.

“Congress has tied my hands,” he told one defendant now.

“We are just going to be warehousing you,” he told another.


“I have to uphold the law whether I agree with it or not,” he said a few minutes later.

I find it painful to read this. But it should be painful to deprive someone of freedom, to take them away from their family, to smash their hopes-- especially if it is not solving a problem.