The Cynic Express(ed) 2.17: Sense in Sentencing?

     In Virginia, Alfred Odell Martin III received ten days for breaking out of jail. What kind of lesson are our judges, or more appropriately (as I live in Missouri) THEIR judges, teaching convicts captured after eluding the law (sort of) for almost twenty-five years? Joan Ziglar, the Commonwealth’s attorney, agrees. She maintained throughout the trial that Martin should spend a lot of time--he could have gotten up to five years for escaping--in jail, so other convicted criminals would not expect that they, too, could walk away from a jail work crew and expect leniency.

     However, obvious bleeding-heart Circuit Judge Charles Stone only appended ten days to the original sentence that Martin received in 1974. Martin sold ten dollars worth of marijuana to an undercover police officer and was sentenced to a year in jail. He walked away after two days, fleeing to Michigan, whereupon he began his twenty-four year normalcy spree.

     During the course of those twenty-four years on the lamb, Martin worked hard, raised four children, and became a suburban father. A far cry from his criminal days in Martinsville, Virginia, where he apparently sold two nickel bags to woman who dropped the dime on him. Ziglar put it: "He is a person who committed crimes, pled guilty and decided he didn't want to do the time. We don't know this person [as] Michigan does. We know Mr. Martin as a drug dealer." Fittingly so. And I sold my ’83 Mustang last year; Missouri considers me a technical writer by trade, but in Virginia I would be just another no good used car salesman (I don’t know--let me talk to my manager about that).

     So Ziglar sought prosecution of Martin for felony escape and, for good measure, larceny by conversion for a TV and stereo he owed money on when he fled to Chicago. So instead of a year in an honor camp, Martin was facing twenty-five years in a Virginia slam. Somewhere in the Old Testament there’s something about an eye for an eye, a year for each year spent in another state in asylum. You see, after a traffic stop in 1974, Virginia sought Martin’s extradition, but Michigan granted him asylum. They got the idea in their heads that ten bucks worth of dope was something less than a grade A felony deserving of leg irons and Silence of the Lambs face mask. So Virginia was understandably upset that some sane Northern state had perspective on the whole affair. The only thing averting the Civil War II was that Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio were not granting Virginia fly-over rights.

     But then the laws changed and his asylum disappeared. So Virginia gets its second crack, um, chance at prosecution. And they want to put him in jail for twenty-five years for selling ten dollars of crack and then escaping, even though he led an upstanding life. Of course, I have to remember that Virginia is on the East Coast, where beating a dog will get you five years in jail and smothering your newborn and throwing it into a dumpster gets you two to two and a half years.

     But convicts and potential escapees everywhere will not get the lesson they need from this case. They will not learn the importance of not getting put on the rack of some small-town prosecutor’s eventual bid for state legislature or higher office. Ziglar will not get to stretch Martin out into her own tough, unforgiving stance on crime and exemplary persecution record. Convicts and escapees will probably learn nothing.

     Maybe the rest of us can take a lesson: judicial discretion in sentencing is good.

     But what do I know? I thought you looked like the kind of person who would love a deal on this low mileage, one-owner, priced to go Vega.