Six Years

On March 8th last year, Marcos Olguin was driving a van carrying 20 illegal immigrants. The van wasn’t being chased by law enforcement or border control; he was just driving from the mountains to the east toward Oceanside, where he was to deliver the smuggled illegal immigrants.

After driving down Honey Springs Road (familiar to anyone from Jamul), he turned onto State 94 — at 55 MPH, an outrageously and recklessly high speed for that right-angle turn. The predictable result: the van flipped, spewing its human occupants. In the over-stuffed van, the immigrants were mostly sitting on the floor, not wearing seat belts.

One woman — pregnant — was killed at the scene, pinned under the van while badly injured. Another woman died later at the hospital. Everybody in the van was injured; some have permanent brain damage, some are physically disabled, some are blind. “The human toll of the crime is staggering,” the prosecutor (Christopher Ott) said. Indeed.

Yesterday federal judge William Q. Hayes rejected the five year sentence requested jointly by the prosecutor and the defense. Instead, he sentenced Olguin to six years.

Two people killed, over a dozen injured, during the commission of a crime — and the sentence is just six years. Whether the objective of the sentence is to act as a deterrent, or to punish the perpetrator, this is an appallingly lenient (and therefore ineffective) outcome. Listen to the perpetrator himself:

“Sometimes we make wrong choices, not because we don’t know the difference between right and wrong, but because we don’t pay attention to the consequences,” Olguin told a San Diego federal judge.

Will Olguin pay attention to these consequences? Will anyone else?

This is yet another example of a peculiar (to me, anyway) view of accountability we have in our system of justice. We hold criminals less accountable when they cause death and injury as a consequence of intentional recklessness rather than intentional violence. I’ve never been able to understand that distinction myself. We also hold drivers less responsible for the consequences of their recklessness with automobiles than we do with their recklessness with other potentially dangerous behavior. You can bet that if those people had been killed and injured because of any other reckless behavior by Olguin, the outcome would have been different. Again, this is a distinction I’ve never understood. And of course one can’t help but suspect that if the victims had been wealthy, white American citizens that the outcome would also have been different.

As if all the preceding wasn’t bad enough, another twisted bit emerged from this story: Olguin was a meth addict at the time of this crime. He asked the judge to allow him to serve his sentence in a Wisconsin penitentiary — so that he could be with his father, who is serving a 30-year sentence in a methamphetamine conspiracy.

Libertarians (like myself) argue that the restrictions the U.S. has placed on immigration and drugs are (a) contrary to the intent and spirit of our country’s founders, and (b) are the biggest engines of crime in our society. This story amply illustrates those points… If immigration was unrestricted, those people would never have been in the van in the first place. There wouldn’t have been any criminal “underground railroad” to bring them here — they’d have arrived via normal (and safe) transportation systems. If drugs were unrestricted, Olguin wouldn’t be motivated — driven — to high-paying, high-risk criminal behavior to pay for his drug habit. Instead, he’d be in the same boat as alcohol addicts are today — his drug of choice would be inexpensive and legally available, but there would be support mechanisms, help available, as needed, for addicts and abusers. Our society has made an arbitrary and capricious choice to make one drug legal (e.g., alcohol) and another illegal (e.g., meth) — with awful results for our society. And, along the way, restricting an individual freedom…