Mississippi Supreme Court upholds 12-year prison term for mere possession of cell phone in jail

If anyone is looking for a recent example of why and how America persistently earns its status as incarceration nation, look no further than this local article, headlined “Miss. Supreme Court upholds 12-year sentence of man convicted for having cellphone in jail.”   Here are the ugly details:

The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the 12-year sentence of a man convicted for having a cellphone in jail on Thursday.

Willie Nash was originally booked in the Newton County Jail for a misdemeanor charge when he asked a jailer to charge his smartphone. The jailer confiscated the phone and brought it to the sheriff’s deputy in charge….

A jury convicted Nash of possessing the cellphone in a correctional facility, a felony that carries three to 15 years in prison.  On Aug. 23, 2018, a judge sentenced Nash to 12 years in prison, telling Nash to “consider himself fortunate” for not being charged as a habitual offender based on his prior burglary convictions. Nash was also fined $5,000….

On appeal, Nash challenged the sentence, arguing a 12-year sentence was “grossly disproportionate to his crime” and in violation of the Eighth Amendment….  As for the proportionality of the sentence, the court ruled that while “obviously harsh,” the sentence was not grossly disproportionate, and the court affirmed the conviction and sentence.

In a separate written opinion, Presiding Justice Leslie D. King agreed the court reached the correct ruling based on case law, but wrote of his concern that the case as a whole “seems to demonstrate a failure of our criminal justice system on multiple levels.”

King said it is probable that the Newton County Jail’s booking procedure was not followed in Nash’s case, allowing him to enter the jail with his phone.  King also noted that Nash’s behavior indicated that he was not aware that inmates could not bring phones into the correctional facility.  Justice King pointed out that Nash voluntarily showed the jailer his phone when asking him to charge it, suggesting that he was not told during booking that he was not allowed to keep his phone.

King also noted that Nash’s criminal history reveals a change in behavior, with his last conviction of burglary being in 2001, which he was sentenced to seven years in prison for.  For eight to 10 years, King said Nash had stayed out of trouble with the law. He also has a wife and three children who depend on him. Based on the nature of his crime, King said the judge should have used his discretion to consider a lesser sentence….

According to the Mississippi Department of Corrections website, Nash’s tentative release date is Feb. 2, 2029.

The full Mississippi Supreme Court opinion in this case is available at this link, and it serves to highlight how easy it is to use extreme and cruel punishments to justify more extreme and cruel punishments.  Because the defendant here is apparently parole eligible in as few as three years, the trial judge was not off-base when telling him that he was lucky not to be facing a true 15-year mandatory minimum under the state’s habitual offender law. And the Supreme Court of Mississippi was able to cite to other cases of defendants getting even harsher sentences(!) for mere cell phone possession to conclude that this harsh sentence was not constitutionally problematic.

With the scale of punishments set so severely for so long in so many places throughout our country, I fear it has become almost routine for many judges and prosecutors to send people off to live in cages for years and years without deep reflection on just what these sentences really mean for the defendant and what they say about American as a nation.  I suspect that, if told in general terms that a citizen had been sent to prison for more than a decade for having a cell phone in the wrong place, most of us would think that this story was coming from China or Russia or some other country with a poor human rights record.  But, in fact, it is just another day in the United States, the supposed land of the free. Sigh.