 Hello, I'm Javier Hernandez reporting from Washington. At a House subcommittee hearing, two federal judges discussed the impact of mandatory minimum sentences. The 1984 Sentencing Reform Act provided the U.S. with the first uniform guidelines on sentencing for all offenses. But over the years, Congress has also added mandatory minimum sentence requirements for a select group of crimes. Some in Congress believe this creates unintended consequences. Once the prosecutor makes the call as to what to charge with, then you're locking the judges in to what they can sentence the individual for, not the facts of the case, but the charge that he was convicted of. So what we've done is shifted discretion away from the judges to exercise discretion and hoisted it upon the prosecution. The Judicial Conference agrees. When you transfer the discretion into the arms of the prosecutor, they're a biased party in the sense that they're representing one side. They're representing the prosecution. Our job as judges is try to balance the competing concerns. And I think from an institutional perspective, we're better able to exercise discretion, better able to make the individualized judgments that are required in sentencing decisions than is one of the parties in the case. And there is a secondary concern with mandatory minimums. When federal judges are forced to follow mandatory minimum sentencing schemes, truly bizarre sentences result, which can seriously undermine public confidence in the system. Cassel recalled being required to sentence a first time offender to 660 months for armed drug dealing. He compared that to the sentence for an aircraft hijacker, a terrorist who detonates a bomb in a public place, and a second degree murderer. The US Sentencing Commission feels mandatory minimums are unnecessary. The commission firmly believes that the sensing guideline system remains the best mechanism for assuring that the statutory purposes of sentencing as set forth in 18 USC section 3553A are met. But Department of Justice officials feel that mandatory minimums are a useful tool during investigations. It allows us to get cooperation from folks at a lower level to work up the food chain, so to speak. And it also allows us to take these people out of the community that are violent. And some legislators believe the mandatory minimums ensure tough sentences. Talk about the message to criminals that they get. It's also a message if we say to criminals, if you do the crime, you're going to do the time. But mandatory minimums put judges in a difficult position. You've created two voices. You want us to listen to the sentencing commission. And in that case, they told me nine years. And obviously you want me to listen to the mandatory minimum sentencing scheme. It's hard for us to follow two masters. Kasell testified that the judicial conference continues to oppose mandatory minimums, a position it's held for more than 50 years. Last year, offenders in over 20,000 cases were convicted of violating a statute that carried a mandatory minimum penalty. Reporting from Washington, I'm Javier Hernandez.