Escaping A Criminal Record

"I can't believe my kids lose their daddy for the next 15 years. He never tried to get a firearm in the 16 years I was with him. It's crazy. He's getting a longer sentence than people who've killed or raped."
Stacy Young, Hixson, Tennessee

Stacy Young is interviewed in the downtown Chattanooga offices of attorney Chris Varner. Her husband, Edward Young, is serving a federal prison sentence for possessing shotgun shells while a convicted felon. Photo by John Rawlston.

The man she married is now 43, his name is Edward Young. Stacy and Edward Young have four children. He once worked six days a week in an effort to support his family. One of their neighbours suffered a death and the widow, Neva Mumpower, asked Edward Young's help in disposing of her husband's belongings. While going through the detritus of a life of collecting, Edward Young discovered among Neva Mumpower's husband's effects, seven shotgun shells, so he put them aside.

"He was trying to help me out. My husband was a pack rat, and I was trying to clear things out," explained Neva Mumpower.

For what happened next there is no reasonable explanation other than miserable fate. A number of burglaries had taken place in the area at storage facilities and vehicles. Suspicion fell on Edward Young because he had a record with the criminal justice system. When he was considerably younger he had been convicted of several burglaries. He was released from prison in 1996, and never looked back.

One can imagine that he never suspected in his new life as bread-earner, husband and father of four young children that criminal justice authorities would be looking back. His past record would have informed investigators that none of Edward Young's past crimes involved guns. But when they came around to search his home police found the set-aside shotgun shells ... but no shotgun. Still federal law bars ex-felons from possession of guns or ammunition.

And under the Armed Career Criminal Act, the charges brought against Edward Young, despite the lack of feasible evidence, automatically racked up to a 15-year minimum sentence. Mr. Young now knows, though he hadn't known before, that he was violating the law, aiding Mrs. Mumpower in her bid to go through her husband's belongings to sell them when among those things were objects that would incriminate him.

A federal judge, looking at the particulars of the case brought against Mr. Young by U.S. attorney William Killian felt the details and what they purported seemed to reflect a situation straight out of medieval England or France when a hungry child could and would be imprisoned for stealing a crust of bread. However, he had no option but to obey the law though local authorities dismissed the burglary charges.

Now a man is taken away from his family for 15 years, his wife left bereft of his company, his children without the guiding hand of a loving father. The federal government is prepared to spend $415,000 over the span of 15 years for this man's imprisonment for inadvertently and unknowingly having in his possession items he had forgotten he had set aside; 7 shotgun shells.

With under 5% of the world's population the United States, in its crackdown on lawlessness has roughly one-quarter of the world's prisoners with American citizens locked up securely in overtaxed, overcrowded, dreadfully expensive and ineffective prisons. Imprisonment has resulted in marriage breakdowns, children bereft of their fathers, and in their turn both despising the law that made semi-orphans of them, and defying it by turning themselves to crime.

Boys in particular become more vulnerable to anti-social acts resulting from the sundering of families and poverty that results from their dissolution. Women raising children, particularly boys on their own are likelier to see their sons become social outcasts turning to crime. And they will practise what happened to them, siring children and abandoning them and their mothers. To single-handedly raise their children, perpetuating the vicious cycle.

Men from low-income neighbourhoods are over-represented in the figure that tells the world that 1% of American men end up in prison at some point in their lives. Edward Young, afflicted increasingly with back problems and rheumatoid arthritis, is partially physically disabled. He became a stay-at-home father. In the process forging a bond between father and children that exceeds most. His wife worked in a doctor's office.

Edward Young's defence lawyer is appealing the sentence handed down however reluctantly to his client. "It's shocking. That's not what we do in this country."  But of course though he would like to think that it is precisely what is done in the U.S. The U.S. prosecuting attorney on the other hand, asked why he would want to send a man to prison for 15 years for possession of 7 shotgun shells, sans shotgun responded: "The case raised serious public safety concerns."

Surely it is past time to modify minimum sentencing by the reasonable expedient of returning common human sense to the system. Permitting judges to exercise their experience in the law and human relations and exercise judgement in circumstances and cases that require some thought other than automatic reaction.

To achieve, in actual fact, justice.