While I agree with much of what was said in Joel Cohen's article, When Judges Struggle With Sentencing, in the December 17th Law Journal, my greater difficulty with sentencing is not when they 'struggle,' it's when they don't.

The trouble with much of sentencing today is that it is too easy—that it is either an intellectual exercise to determine which box into which to fit the defendant or his conduct, or it is adding up a bunch of cold 'points' or it is an agreed sentence into which the judge has had little input.

Sending someone to prison should be the hardest thing a judge sitting in a criminal term should ever have to do, yet we have made it too damn easy with our politically mandated mandatory sentences.