PANAMA CITY — In August, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called for sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system. Too many people, he said, are sitting in prison for drug offenses due to minimum mandatory sentences.
Pamela Marsh, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Florida, was part of the advisory committee that helped develop the ideas Holder talked about.
“We’ve been talking and discussing these matters for six months,” Marsh said.
Marsh had a good idea of what Holder would say, and she doesn’t expect the speech to have a significant impact on federal prosecutions at the local level because, she said, prosecutors here already have been emphasizing the kind of cases Holder suggested deserve priority.
Holder said he wanted prosecutors to go after violent offenders and those with ties to organized crime, and Marsh said those are the kind of cases her office makes a priority.
“I think we’re already prosecuting the right kind of crimes,” Marsh said in an interview after Holder’s speech. “I’m not sure you’ll see a sea change in the kind of cases we bring to court.”
Drug cases comprise the biggest portion of local federal prosecutors’ workloads. In the 12 months prior to March 2013, prosecutors in the Northern District of Florida brought felony charges against 312 defendants. Nearly a third, 101, of those defendants faced drug charges. No felony charges were brought for marijuana offenses.
Drug offenses have long topped the list of crimes for which people are incarcerated in Florida, just as they do in many other states. Drug offenders made up 48 percent of all federal prison inmates in 2011, while violent offenders made up 7.6 percent, according to a report published in December by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Any effort to reduce the number of nonviolent drug offenders might be better suited for state court cases. Just because the U.S. attorney general advocates a position, it doesn’t mean state attorneys have to change the way they do business.
Prosecutors at the state level have broad discretion to determine how to charge a defendant, and the charging decision can have a great impact on the consequences for a defendant.
The difference between a charge of trafficking in controlled substances and possession of a controlled substance can be the difference between spending a year in drug treatment or spending three years in prison, said Greg Wilson, felony chief for the State Attorney’s Office.
“What the prosecutors in our office have been told is to evaluate each case individually,” Wilson said. “We use a common sense approach.”
Questions they may consider include: What’s the defendant’s background? Is the defendant a drug addict who was arrested with some pills in their possession, or is the defendant a drug dealer who happens to be addicted to their product? Does the defendant have a history of violence?
Prosecutors in state court ask these questions before they decide whether it’s appropriate to level a trafficking charge, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence that varies depending on the amount of drugs, or a charge of possession with intent to distribute.
According to data from the Clerk of Courts’ office, those trafficking charges are rare. Less than 100 of more than 10,000 drug counts resolved since 2005 have been for trafficking various drugs.
Holder wants to give the judges and lawyers of the federal criminal justice system more discretion, and one area where they might use it is in the charges they bring against drug offenders, said Jean Marie Downing, an attorney who defends clients in state and federal court.
In federal court, minimum mandatory sentences are triggered by the weight of the drugs seized by law enforcement, and in conspiracy cases everyone who’s charged with conspiracy is charged with the weight of all the drugs seized, even if drugs were not seized from a particular conspirator, Downing said.
