District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Stanley Sporkin spoke yesterday afternoon about the need for judicial discretion in court sentencing.
The speech, which attracted an audience of nearly 40 students, was titled "Whatever Happened to the Heart and Soul of the Law and How Come We Don't Have Judges Like Judge Timbers anymore?" and was held in Room 3 of the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences.
Sporkin's lecture was the final speech of the Dartmouth Lawyers Association's series on Law and the Liberal Arts and the first annual Judge William H. Timbers '37 lecture.
Sporkin began by praising Timbers. He said Timbers was "the essence of what a great judge should be."
"He cared about what impact his decision would have on the public interest," Sporkin said, citing Timbers' work as general counsel to the Securities and Exchange Commission and as a judge for the District Court of Connecticut and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Sporkin then spoke of his own dissatisfaction with the state of justice in the United States.
"I always had the romantic idea that people resorted to the law to seek justice," he said. "We are more and more becoming courts of injustice."
As an example, Sporkin cited the case of a homosexual cross-dresser who was scheduled to be sentenced to a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years after selling 6.59 grams of crack cocaine to undercover police officers.
"He wouldn't hurt a fly. He's no more dangerous than my five- year-old grandson, and we want to put him in jail for 30 years," he said.
Sporkin said that police "targeted" the man and forced him into selling cocaine to them, then used the man's "lifestyle convictions" for prostitution to justify the sentence.
Sporkin also cited the case of an American Jew whose family was exterminated by the Germans during the Holocaust and sued Germany for war reparations.
Since Germany would not pay him reparations because he was not a German Jew, the man sued Germany in Sporkin's court and Sporkin denied a request by the German government to throw the case out for lack of jurisdiction.
"This man suffered a horrendous indignity," Sporkin said. "An American court must be available to the plaintiff to accept the defendant's position."
Sporkin's decision not to throw the case out was eventually overturned by an appeals court, a reversal in which, he said, the United States "strayed far from its birthright."
In a question and answer session after his lecture, Sporkin discussed his opposition to mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for judges and his views on America's drug war.
He said that sentencing guidelines ignore the fact that "it is the judge that has to look the defendant in the eye and sentence him."
Sporkin cited the case of an 18-year-old who was tried in his court for bringing Colombian cocaine into the country through the mail and faced harsh penalties.
Yet Sporkin said the wayward youth eventually became a physician and currently interns at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center.
"Do we throw the key away for these people?" Sporkin asked. "I'm not a bleeding heart, but all kinds of people make mistakes."
He also said that landmark court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, which forced public schools to integrate, would not have occurred if judges were forced to rely on federal guidelines.
"There are many decisions that would not be if judges didn't do the right thing at the right time," he said.
Sporkin said the rise of mandatory minimum sentencing is ominous. "I'm suggesting to you that we're getting very close" to mandatory executions for drug users, he said.
Yet he said he does not support the legalization of drugs, but rather better enforcement.
"They're not enforcing the drug laws right. What they're interested in is the statistics," he said. "They have not been organized to do it and it drives me absolutely nuts."
Sporkin said the "mules" that transport drugs are the usual victims of enforcement efforts and not major traffickers.
"I've got to sentence women with kids ... and put them away as the great threat to society," he said.
The Judge William H. Timbers '37 lecture was made possible by an endowment made to the Daniel Webster fund by the New York law firm Skadden-Arps, which Timbers once practiced for.
