Kevin Washington's crime seemed to fit Pennsylvania's mandatory-sentencing law perfectly. He robbed a woman and her 5-year-old daughter at gunpoint in a West Philadelphia park.
Under the law, anyone who displays a gun while committing a robbery is supposed to go to prison for at least five years.
But Washington ended up with a much lighter sentence.
The Philadelphia court system offered him, as it offers thousands of criminal defendants, a break.
He could do a favor to get a favor.
And he did.
Washington waived his right to a jury trial last year and let a judge hear his case.
To the court system, that was a significant gesture. Jury trials are a time-consuming luxury. Too many of them and Common Pleas courts, which handle 14,000 criminal cases a year, would go into gridlock.
For waiving a jury trial, Washington, 20, of West Philadelphia, received what is unofficially known as a ``waiver discount.'' Instead of five years, he got nine to 23 months.
Though not widely known to the public, such discounts are the oil that keeps the engine of the criminal courts running.
A review by The Inquirer found that many criminal cases involving robberies, assaults and drug violations that seem to fall under the mandatory-sentencing law are being diluted as they wind through the courts.
Some judges and defense attorneys say the practice is necessary to keep an endless flow of cases moving and to offset unreasonably rigid sentencing laws.
But officials in the District Attorney's Office contend that many serious crimes are watered down with waiver discounts granted by judges under pressure to move cases. The result, they say, is discount justice.
``Why should a person who commits a gunpoint robbery get a break?'' asked Joel Rosen, chief of the major-trial unit of the District Attorney's Office. ``That's what the mandatory-sentencing law is directed toward, to get judges to send people who commit these crimes to jail for a substantial period of time.''
``What's hurting the public is that the sentencing and the verdicts are inappropriate,'' said First Assistant District Attorney Arnold H. Gordon. ``They don't fit the crime.''
* Forty-two Common Pleas Court judges spend their days in the Criminal Justice Center hearing details of crimes ranging from shoplifting to murder.
