Imprisoned Cuban immigrant receives an act of mercy in the name of justice | Editorial

What’s the appropriate punishment for causing a person’s death?

There’s no perfect mathematical equation for fairness, and Americans have long debated how to punish people convicted of crimes. But in the case of a Cuban immigrant found guilty of causing a deadly 28-vehicle pileup in Colorado, many people — from Kim Kardashian to the judge and prosecutor in the case — agree the sentence he received is too harsh: 110 years.

Mercifully — and ethically and sensibly — Colorado’s Gov. Jared Polis has commuted the sentence of truck driver Rogel Aguilera-Mederos to 10 years.

“While you are not blameless, your sentence is disproportionate compared with many other inmates in our criminal justice system who committed intentional, premeditated, or violent crimes,” Polis’ said in his well-reasoned commutation letter.

Truck’s brakes fail

In 2019, Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos slammed his semi truck into a group of cars that were backed up in traffic on a highway west of Denver, Colorado. Aguilera-Mederos, 23 at the time, was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but a series of reckless and negligent — perhaps even selfish — decisions caused the deaths of four people.

Aguilera-Mederos lost control of the truck after its brakes failed, but he didn’t take a emergency “runaway truck” exit ramp, a point the prosecution focused on during the trial. He tried to pull over to the shoulder to avoid stopped traffic, but another semi had already stopped there, he said.

He was found guilty in October of vehicular homicide and 23 other charges, including careless driving causing death.

That Aguilera-Mederos is guilty and deserves punishment is indisputable. Those four deaths aren’t any less painful because of his lack of intent to kill, but 110 years amounted to a life sentence for a crime that he didn’t mean to commit.

The judge overseeing the case agreed, but said Colorado law imposes minimum sentences for each of the crimes Aguilera-Mederos committed that must be served consecutively, not simultaneously. After public outcry, the prosecutor who pursued the case has asked for the harsh sentence to be reviewed.

It’s not news that minimum mandatory sentences can be problematic. They take away a judge’s discretion and ignore details about the case. They also impact poor people and racial minorities disproportionately, as the war on drugs showed with its excessive sentences for drug crimes that put many Black men behind bars for decades longer than whites convicted of similar crimes.

Question of status

We don’t know what the outcome of Aguilera-Mederos’ original case would’ve been had he been a person of influence and not a young immigrant and a truck driver. We also don’t know how many other people, regardless of social status and race — but without the same media hype and attention from celebrities — may have received excessive sentences.

A previous case sheds light on how the justice system can work differently for different people. The former mayor of Boulder was charged with nine counts, including felony vehicular homicide, after speeding, driving aggressively, then killing a woman in a crash in 2016. He accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to a year of home detention, 10 years of probation, ordered to perform 200 hours of community service, fined $100,000 and ordered to donate $1 million to a charity.

The prosecutors in Aguilera-Mederos’ case had said the truck driver wasn’t interested “in pursuing those negotiations,” but the Denver Post Editorial Board said neither the district attorney nor Aguilera-Mederos’ defense answered questions “about specific deals that may have been offered or rejected.”

The Denver Post Editorial Board was among those calling on Colorado’s governor to commute part of the sentence and reduce it “to something more reasonable.”

Colorado’s governor, wisely, did just that.

Still, the question, How do you come up with a “reasonable” sentence?, continues to confound our justice system — especially when we have seen throughout our history that crime and punishment aren’t always equal in America.