Justice committee  Mr. Murphy, there's a great deal of discussion in the United States, especially in the press, around this issue. Not only has Governor Schwarzenegger brought it up, but numbers of members of Congress have brought it up in hearings in the context of the violence in Mexico. Legal

Justice committee  The American application of the mandatory minimums has been overwhelmingly against low-level offenders. I was very disturbed when I heard the question from Mr. Storseth earlier, who asked about the seven prior convictions and the recidivists. These are low-level offenders, if I

Justice committee  Mr. Murphy, it's a very good question. It would be difficult over 22 years to say that the only factor that has affected crime in America was the mandatory minimum sentences in the federal regime. There are 14 million arrests by police officers in the United States nationwide e

Justice committee  The first thing is to think about organized crime rather than simply the drugs themselves. Do your police have adequate intelligence units? Do they have the ability to go after assets? Do you have laws that permit wiretapping? Do you go undercover? There are a variety of tools. I

Justice committee  Yes, Mr. Murphy, you're absolutely correct. The very long periods in the American law are counter-productive, because the lesson gets learned pretty quickly, and the many years after the lesson is learned are wasted years. One of the first points I made in my testimony earlier to

Justice committee  I haven't seen any. I'm not aware of any studies that demonstrate that mandatory minimums are effective in carrying out the policies of the legislature.

Justice committee  The prison population was 36,000 in 1986. It's 203,000 now. We're talking only about the federal prison population; we're not talking about the prison population in the 50 states. These are the totals for all federal crimes. The current drug offender population exclusively right

Justice committee  I'm terribly sorry.

Justice committee  Thank you, Madam. With respect to effectiveness, your first goal should be to save lives. The drug policy and the laws that carry out the drug policy should be about saving lives. In the United States, since 1980, the death rate from the use of illegal drugs has more than triple

Justice committee  Thank you very much. The essence of the ineffectiveness in the United States has been, I believe, that the quantities have distracted law enforcement from focusing on high-level traffickers, that the quantity thresholds—500 grams, 5,000 grams, 100 plants, 1,000 plants, 1,000 kil

Justice committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I'm Eric Sterling. In 1986 I was in the situation you are in, considering legislation to adopt mandatory minimum sentences being considered by the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress. I commend you for