As I read the Sunday Denver Post report on the wide disparity in punishment for drunken drivers who are arrested multiple times, I couldn’t help but think of another report years ago that helped inspire sentencing reform.
In 1983, just as the get-tough-on- crime movement was flowering both in Colorado and around the nation, Rocky Mountain News reporter Norm Draper decided to draw a bead on sentences imposed on killers convicted in Denver courts. It was not a pretty picture.
Draper highlighted a pattern of surprisingly light punishment that had slipped under the public radar, in which “the median sentence for a homicide is eight years . . . . But the time actually served in prison is half the sentence.” In fact, he wrote, “a third of the killers convicted in Denver during the past six years spent two years or less in prison.”
Even a “life sentence” at that time involved a minimum of only 20 years behind bars.
Needless to say, readers were scandalized. It wasn’t just that sentences seemed soft as putty, but that offenders elsewhere in the state might be treated more harshly for the same crimes.
I don’t know if The Post’s report on DUI sentencing will trigger a similar resolve to change the law, but it should. Just as most people assumed in 1983 that killers were generally serving long spells in prison, most people today probably believe that a motorist convicted for the third or fourth or fifth DUI will spend at least some time in jail. Yet that simply isn’t the case.
If a judge wants to jail every repeat offender she sees, she’s free to do so — and Arapahoe County Judge Dana Murray very nearly does, even if some sentences are for only a few days. But other judges, such as Adams County’s Robert Doyle, seem to go out of their way to give multiple offenders a break with such options as home detention with an alcohol-monitoring device.
You can understand that there would be an array of opinions among judges over jail time for a second offense. Maybe even for a third offense. But five, six, seven?
Of course, it would be helpful before changing the law to know which strategy — jail or an alternative — works better as a deterrent, or if there’s any difference at all. Someone with multiple arrests, at least with high blood-alcohol readings, may be so addicted to booze that even an intimate session with Torquemada wouldn’t faze him.
Yet even if that’s the case, there’s little doubt that a motorist with, say, seven DUIs — and Post reporters actually found one who remained free — ought to make more than a token appearance inside a jail cell. By that time, after all, the courts do know that nothing else is going to work.
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One of the most notable achievements of the get-tough-on-crime movement of the 1980s and early 1990s was the spread of statutes mandating a life sentence without parole for crimes such as first-degree murder. Colorado now has 503 lifers with no chance of parole, according to a July 15 bulletin from the Department of Corrections.
Nationally, there are 42,000 such lifers, and some advocacy groups think that’s way too many. “Life without parole sentences are costly, shortsighted, and ignore the potential for transformative personal growth,” argues The Sentencing Project in a recent report. It recommends that states follow the example of Canada, “where all persons serving life are considered for parole after serving 10 to 25 years.”
Please. Bulging prisons and their growing costs may be reason to rethink some penalties, but not life without parole for first-degree murder. It’s the one penalty that most logically relates to the crime: If you take a life, you’ll pay by losing your freedom for life.
Those of us who oppose capital punishment ought to be especially protective of life without parole because if we lose it, we’ll also lose one of the best arguments for why the death penalty isn’t needed.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
