WELDON ANGELOS GREW up in a musical family. His father, a Greek immigrant, aspired to be a country singer, while relatives on his mother’s side were jazz and country musicians. Angelos’ tastes were somewhat different: By his early 20s, he had gotten a start as a rap producer.
Angelos had collaborated with well-known hip-hop artists, including Snoop Dogg. He had his own label in Salt Lake City, Extravagant Records. To supplement his income and support his two young children, Angelos also sold marijuana, which is how he ended up with a 55-year federal prison sentence.
That jaw-dropping punishment, demanded by a statute aimed at armed drug dealers, starkly illustrates how drug and gun laws interact to produce results that make a mockery of justice. In vainly striving to control inanimate objects they associate with disorder and violence, legislators create penalties that send human beings to prison for years, decades, and sometimes the rest of their lives. The combination of these twin crusades, both of which punish conduct that violates no one’s rights, is potent enough to override anything that stands in their way, including decency, proportionality, and respect for civil liberties.
‘UNJUST, CRUEL, AND EVEN IRRATIONAL’
ANGELOS WAS NOT exactly a cannabis kingpin. His 2002 arrest was based on three eight-ounce sales to a childhood acquaintance who had become a police informant. The proceeds totaled about $1,000. But Angelos also owned handguns, and the informant said he had seen one during the first two pot sales—once near the center console of Angelos’ car and once in an ankle holster. Police found three handguns when they searched Angelos’ apartment. Although he had no prior convictions and had never threatened or injured anyone with a gun, those firearms were enough to trigger a federal law that prescribed mandatory minimum sentences for possessing a firearm “in furtherance of” drug trafficking.
The first such offense carried a five-year mandatory minimum, which rose to 25 years for each subsequent offense, with all sentences to be served consecutively. A jury convicted Angelos of three gun charges—one for each marijuana sale—along with various drug and money laundering charges. So even apart from those other charges, Angelos was looking at a sentence that would keep him in prison until he was an old man, assuming he survived that long. The mandatory minimum was nearly four times as long as the 15-year sentence that prosecutors had proposed in a plea offer that Angelos rejected.
U.S. District Judge Paul G. Cassell marveled at that situation when he sentenced Angelos, then 25, in 2004. “For these three acts of possessing (not using or even displaying) these guns, the government insists that Mr. Angelos should essentially spend the rest of his life in prison,” Cassell wrote. “Specifically, the government urges the court to sentence Mr. Angelos to a prison term of no less than 61½ years—six years and a half (or more) for drug dealing followed by 55 years for three counts of possessing a firearm in connection with a drug offense.”
In light of the severe mandatory penalty, Cassell sentenced Angelos to one day for all the other charges. But he had no choice about imposing the 55-year sentence, which he called “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.” Cassell noted that it was “far in excess
