American Justice
by digby
I was railing about the horror of locking up the Guantanamo prisoners forever with no due process earlier. And then I read this:
LANCE SALTZMAN did not like the way his stepfather, Toni Minnick, settled arguments with his mother, Christina Borg. Once Mr Minnick fired a gun into a wall beside her. A couple of weeks later, says Ms Borg, he threatened to shoot her. So Mr Saltzman went into his stepfather’s bedroom and took the gun. He sold it to a friend, who used it in a burglary. Mr Saltzman was charged with burglary, theft and being a felon in possession of a firearm—all for taking a gun from his own house—as well as with the burglary committed using the gun, in which he says he took no part. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He was 22.
Mr Saltzman was mauled by a pit bull as a toddler and is “not altogether upstairs all the time”, says his mother. In his teens he got hooked on drugs and was convicted of marijuana possession, trespassing and petty theft. He was then jailed for a burglary he committed when he was 16, and this was his undoing.
He stole his stepfather’s gun within three years of his release; under a Florida mandatory-sentencing law for re-offenders, the judge had to lock him up for ever. Given Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws, Ms Borg believes that her son would probably be free if he had shot his menacing stepfather instead of stealing his gun.
So much for due process. Read the ACLU report about the thousands of prisoners serving life without parole sentences for non-violent offenses — if you can stomach the injustice.
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