Irrational ‘Justice’

Suppose you are one of the many Harvard students who illicitly uses marijuana on a regular basis. And now imagine the worst case scenario: you are enjoying a post-exam spliff in the company of friends in a private bedroom. Then, from the door, an ominous voice intones, “Open up. It’s HUPD.” You are arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

But that extent, Harvard students should be well aware, varies wildly.

Massachusett’s Controlled Substances Act imposes a harsh mandatory sentence of two to 15 years of jail time on top of a normal sentence if one is convicted of a drug crime within a 1,000-foot radius of a “school property.” Most students at Harvard, however, are scarcely aware of the existence of nearby schools, let alone their proximity to them. For instance, the Radcliffe Child Care Center below the DeWolfe apartments affects students in Lowell House. All in all, 10 of the 12 houses fall fully or partially within school zones.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with the law’s underlying logic, which considers giving minors access to controlled substances a higher crime than simply possessing drugs. The law was sold to the public and the legislature in 1989 by then-Governor Michael Dukakis on the idea that it would punish those who would put drugs into children’s hands. Similar laws have ameliorated the influence of drugs at high schools across the country.

Since it’s hard to prove in a court of law that someone is selling drugs to minor, however, the law uses 1,000-foot rule as a kind of approximation. This would be fine if it allowed prosecutorial or judicial discretion for cases that defy reason. As written, however, the law provides no such exception, a fact that peeves prosecutors and judges—who focus on its racially disparate impact—as much as Harvard students.

The state court’s chief justice for administration and management, Robert A. Mullignan, has criticized such laws vociferously. He pointed out that, for instance, in the city of Boston “unless you’re on the tarmac of Logan Airport, you’re within 1,000 feet of a school.”

Similarly, state Representative William Brownsberger, who worked on drug cases as an assistant attorney general,” made the “moderation of mandatory sentencing policies” an integral part of his legislative platform. According to a study he conducted, a full 80 percent of drug cases occur within these zones but only one percent of these cases concern drug sales to minors.

Indeed, in cases at Harvard there has been no indication undergraduates charged under the school-zone law intended to distribute the drugs to minors—and certainly not to the minors occupying the buildings whose vicinity suddenly renders drug offenders eligible for a much stiffer sentence. The undergrad with a dozen psychedelic mushrooms living high in Mather Tower, for instance, is not interested in padding his clientele with the young learners of Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary far below.

In these instances, the judiciary’s function of meting out well-contemplated, proportional justice to offenders has been completely overridden by a mandatory sentence out of all proportion to the crime committed. What logic, for instance, explains why a joint smoked in Winthrop H entry earns a sentence of at least two additional years in jail compared to the same joint smoked in Winthrop’s C entry?

We hope that the legislature will take Brownsberger’s suggestion to overhaul the law. Keeping drugs out of the hands of children is a laudable goal, but unfortunately, this law has very little to do with that end.