This blog post is part of a three part series on North Carolina’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug trafficking. Each part follows the story of a defendant based on a real client. Part 1 provides a basic explanation of North Carolina’s drug trafficking and mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Part 2 focuses on the social harms of mandatory minimum sentencing and a recent reform bill that the North Carolina General Assembly passed in June of 2020. Part 3 explores what a criminal justice reform bill might look like that abolishes or substantially reduces the impact of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, while still holding real drug traffickers accountable.
If you have read part 1 of this series, you are familiar with drug trafficking and minimum sentencing laws are in North Carolina. If you read part 2, you saw the date on how mandatory minimum sentencing is expensive, ineffective, and bad public policy. You also know that in a moment when criminal justice reform is enjoying bipartisan support at the state and federal level, North Carolina passed the First Step Act which may have little to no effect at all on addressing the social harms of mandatory minimum sentences. This part is a proposed alternative to the status quo and call to action to contact your legislators and plead for a reform bill that meaningfully restructures a sentencing system that disproportionately affects poor and black defendants.
Abolishing Mandatory Minimum Sentences
Before I talk about ways to reform drug trafficking laws, consider for a moment the idea of what would happen if we just ripped mandatory minimum sentences out of the books without replacing them with anything. Would the world continue to turn? Of course it would. Here is why: as I showed you in part 1, we already have a structured sentencing system that we use for almost every other crime that punishes you for the length of your criminal record and the severity of your crime. The chart is available here. Let’s take the heroin and opium example. Here is a comparison of what your sentence would be under the current mandatory minimum sentence structure (top) and under the normal structured sentence (bottom).