As a matter of fact, what your point reminds me of is the comment that was made by the study done for the justice department when they said that juries may well be less willing to convict when the offence at issue contains a mandatory minimum. That's part of the problem: that it has such a distorting effect on the way justice is administered.
Incidentally, another one of the interesting findings of that survey that was done of judges a number of years ago is that about 95% of them said mandatory minimums lead to inappropriate plea bargaining at least some of the time. That's another example of how this distorts the justice system.