Tidbits in a Slow News Week

It's been a pretty slow week for sentencing news, but here are a few interesting things we scrounged up:

• This New York Times article describes New Mexico's serious problems with prescription drug overdoses.  Note that none of the experts interviewed recommend solving the problem with harsher sentencing laws.
• Only 44% of Americans in a new poll approve of the job the U.S. Supreme Court is doing.  We know from past polling that people overwhelmingly prefer judges over Congress when it comes to making sentencing decisions; the low approval for the justices is apparently linked to the upcoming decision on the new health care law and a view that the  high court has become too political since Bush v. Gore.
• Compare the 23-year sentence (via plea agreement) of a Jamaican drug lord who ran a conspiracy involving 200 foot soldiers and sparked a manhunt that led to 70 deaths with any number of harsher sentences over at our website.  Make sense to you?  Yeah, we didn't think so.