Background on Mandatory Minimums

Mandatory Minimums Background

Lionel Tate’s original sentence brings up the concept of mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums mean that a person convicted of a crime must be imprisoned for a minimum term. The Crime Act of 1790 represents one of the first legislated pieces that refer to mandatory minimums. Within this act, there were seven offenses that require a punishment of death. However, this piece of legislation actually represented a shift towards a “proportional assignment of punishment”. During this period the house moved away from the widespread utilization of the death penalty to more “discretionary terms of imprisonment”. Following this movement of proportionality congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798 and Logan Act of 1799. These acts created new offenses, such as unlawful assembly, that carried a penalty of at least six months in prison. Following this trend congress passed the 1807 act. This act implemented a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years for any individual who serves on a ship that transports slaves.

A shift away from mandatory minimums occurred in 1825 when Congress passed the Crimes Act of 1825. Within this act, there were no mandatory minimum penalties. However, this act maintained that three offenses still require a mandatory minimum penalty of death. Similarly, the 1862 act changed the penalty for treason from a mandatory death penalty to be up to the discretion of the court.

However, one of the most recent examples of the implementation of a mandatory minimum has been through Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill, otherwise known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This act created 60 new death penalty offenses, most of which were related to terrorism. This act is most famous for introducing the Three-strikes law. This law requires a person who has committed the crimes at a felony level and is a continuation of the mandatory minimum sentencing mindset.