Marijuana grower’s 20-year prison sentence prompts judge to question drug laws’ mandatory minimums.
An article in the Buffalo News may have triggered some humanity in a Judge’s mind. It goes on to read.
Joseph Tigano III is going to prison for growing marijuana – and he’s going for a long time. Too long in the eyes of the federal judge who sentenced him.
The Cattaraugus County man, convicted of operating a marijuana farm with more than 1,000 plants, found himself Monday in the middle of the national drug sentencing debate.
Sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison, Tigano is one of those defendants whom reform advocates point to when making the case for more lenient drug penalties.
“I feel it is much greater than necessary,” U.S. District Judge Elizabeth A. Wolford said of the mandatory 20-year sentence, “but I do not have a choice.”
Speaking from the bench, Wolford made it clear that she would have preferred sentencing Tigano to less time in prison and suggested at one point that his single firearms conviction was more worrisome than any of his four drug convictions.
The judge’s comments came at a time when members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, are weighing recommended reforms to mandatory minimum drug penalties.
Years in the making, the push for reform is coming from lawyers and judges who think that too many nonviolent drug offenders are going to prison, and for far too long. They also contend that half of the federal prison population is serving time for drug crimes.
Now 51, Tigano was found guilty by a jury in May of manufacturing and distributing marijuana, maintaining a premise for the manufacture of marijuana, conspiracy to manufacture and possess marijuana and being a previously convicted felon in possession of firearms.
Under the law, he could have faced up to life in prison.
“There’s clearly a need for you to be punished,” Wolford told Tigano. “But I do not believe you present a danger to the community, by any means.”
Arrested in 2008 at his home in the Village of Cattaraugus, Tigano and his father, Joseph Sr., now 77, were accused of running a multimillion-dollar marijuana business.
Despite the size and scope of his business, Tigano was portrayed Monday as a defendant facing an excessive amount of time behind bars.
Cheryl Meyers Buth, Tigano’s defense lawyer, praised Wolford for challenging the mandatory minimum sentences that exist in so many drug laws and suggested that her client is simply the latest defendant to face an unfair punishment.
“I think Judge Wolford quite bravely went on the record to give her opinion that although she does not have the discretion to impose a sentence under the mandatory minimum, she thought a sentence about half as severe would have been more reasonable,” Meyers Buth said.
