Mandatory minimums leave justice a work in progress

When I was growing up, my father ran a grocery store. In those early days we suffered from the so-called blue laws. We lived over the grocery store. The blue laws did not permit us to open the store on Sunday or sell anything on Sunday.

There were times when we violated those laws. My supposition is that God will not judge us harshly because every once in a while customers would come to our side door on a Sunday with a plea for a quart of milk for the baby or even a loaf of bread. The police dutifully patrolled looking for violators. I don't think we were ever cited, but to a child to be concerned that we might be caught slipping a quart of milk to a young mother on a Sunday was scary. We were always careful to do what we could to mitigate our sins. Most often we would decline payment on Sunday but would expect payment the next day.

It seemed less of a sin with respect to those we dealt with on credit. The entry would dutifully be made the next day.

All in all, it was confusing. Seemingly the prohibition to transact business on Sunday had as its purpose to encourage religious observation of the day. It puzzled me why we could freely sell bread and milk on Holy Days of Obligation, but not on Sunday.

My recollection is that at first, you could not go to the movies on Sunday. I think that was later modified so the movies could open after 2 p.m. That would allow a reasonable time in the morning to go to church.

Those rules went away, as did the religious rule that we could not eat meat on Fridays. I wondered always what happened to those Catholics who ate hot dogs on Friday before the rule got changed. I bet there was a retroactive adjustment. Maybe it was on the basis of a godly application for parole.

I wince when I think back to the law that permitted brutal whippings of prisoners and even encouraged public displays of whippings. I recall as a young man reading of the last person to be whipped in Delaware. I recall an article in the Saturday Evening Post that held up the Delaware law for the whole world to see. One of my colleagues, who is slightly older than I am, told me that young kids used to bicycle to Stockley to witness the beatings. It seems so ironic that we put people in jail today who are accused of beating animals, but as a society we exacted from prisoners the brutal penalty of public flogging.

The whipping post in Delaware was affectionately referred to as Red Hannah. We do not allow that kind of behavior even with respect to our worst enemies, people who have tried to destroy our country, our prisoners, our livestock or our animals.

But we grew up with a lot of goofy laws. Laws that make you shake your head today and ask "Why?" Why did we tolerate a law that separated people on the basis of race or ethnic origin, why did we tolerate a law that permitted exclusion of people from buying a home because or their race or national origin or religion?

Why was it that women were not permitted to vote? Can you believe it actually required a Constitutional amendment before women in this country were permitted to vote? Today we shake our heads in disbelief that some "backward" countries are just beginning to allow women to vote.

We still have some goofy laws. If some political power proposed to pass a law that said you could be sent to jail without a trial, that political power would be exiled to oblivion. Not in America! As American citizens, we would be outraged.

But how about a political power that says unless you agree to forfeit your right to trial and plead guilty to an offense for which a judge will impose a sentence, the political power will charge you with an offense that will allow you to be sentenced without the judgment of a judge to a mandatory term of five years in prison? Is that consistent with our belief that before we can be punished, we are entitled to have judgment of a body of jurors from our community and that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property unless by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land?

Can it be that in this forward-looking country, we would tolerate extorting a plea of guilty under the threat that unless the plea is given, a United States citizen will be required to stand trial for a crime conviction of which would condemn him or her to jail without the judgment of a legally trained judge?

I suppose in years to come when this law is no longer permitted, we will shake our heads as we do when we think back to those old blue law days, to the whipping post, to the laws about who you could eat with, visit with or live next to. I worry about the people who will be victimized until the correction is made. Hopefully, those Catholics who ate a hot dog on Friday before the rule was changed will be moved out of hell into a better place. Perhaps those who have been victimized by the threat of mandatory sentence will get some consideration. In the meantime, we will say to the spouses, parents and children of those who have been victims of that system of corrections, that it is being worked on.

We no longer brutalize prisoners; we can now buy milk and bread on Sunday; women can vote; adults can even legitimately drink a beer. For most of the year, I can eat a hot dog on Friday; kids go to school with other kids regardless of race or national origin, and although some still question the 19th Amendment, women have the same right to vote as males. You can live wherever you can afford the mortgage payments, or drink water out of water fountains without regard to race.

We are truly an amazing country. We have been through some bad stuff, but we are gradually working our way through. Make no mistake about it. We are the greatest country in the world. We enjoy the most freedom of any country in the world but we also continue to be a work in progress.

Victor F. Battaglia is a Wilmington lawyer.