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MA: Mandatory Minimums in Action: A Berkshire County case highlights the controversies in school-zone sentencing.

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

Mandatory Minimums in Action: A Berkshire County case highlights the controversies in school-zone sentencing. February 26, 2009 By Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate (Northampton, MA) On a June morning in 2004, 17-year-old Mitchell Lawrence rode his bicycle from his home in Otis to Great Barrington, where he met up with friends in a parking lot outside a movie theater. Lawrence, who would start his senior year in high school that fall, went to the parking lot several times a week, where a group of teens regularly met up to pass the time, playing hackey sack and smoking pot. A few weeks earlier, a new person had begun joining the group. Mitchell knew the new guy as ?José?; what he didn?t know was that José was an undercover detective, working as part of a wide-scale Berkshire County drug task force operation that eventually would yield 19 drug-related arrests?and generate a considerable amount of controversy...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on February 26, 2009 (boomark / email).