The court's sentence in the Texas "affluenza" case was irrationally disproportionate. But so was a mandatory sentence imposed on a Pennsylvania teenager convicted of crack cocaine possession – his first arrest and his first conviction. This young man would have been the first in his family to attend college. Instead, the law required a sentence of 10 years in federal prison with no possibility of parole.

I was the judge forced to impose this perverse sentence, and the same result occurs everyday because too many sentencing laws preclude judges from considering defendants' life circumstances. Too often, discretion is nullified by absurd, medieval mandatory regimes.

Unfortunately, measures to limit judicial discretion have done little to address the racial and economic disparities that plague our justice system. And according to the Justice Policy Institute, laws that remove discretion, such as "Three Strikes" and mandatory minimums, have caused our prison population to explode from 338,000 in 1972 to more than 2 million today, with unduly severe consequences for the offenders, their families, our economy and our society.

The "affluenza" case demonstrates that we have much work to do to eliminate disparity from our justice system. How can a person convicted of vehicular homicide escape harsh punishment because he was too privileged to know better while the life circumstances of the poor, who make up the vast majority of our prison population, are irrelevant?

Thankfully, federal and state policymakers are finally awakening to this injustice, and that bipartisan effort is most welcome. Congress is considering the Smarter Sentencing and Justice Safety Valve Acts. Both would enhance judges' abilities to make sentencing determinations. They are sponsored by the unlikeliest of allies: Senators Richard Durbin and Mike Lee; and Patrick Leahy and Rand Paul.

Judicial discretion might live again.

Originally published by The New York Times.

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