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Gehrke: Sundance winner is a heartbreaker that shows why we must reform drug sentencing

Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune The Salt Lake Tribune staff portraits. Robert Gehrke.

There’s something about seeing the pain in the eyes of 13-year-old Autumn Shank, who grew up since the age of 4 without her mother, that makes any sensible person ask: “What are we doing?”

Autumn and her sisters, Ava and Annalis, are the central focus of “The Sentence,” an intensely intimate and heart-wrenching documentary that tells the story about their mother, Cindy Shank, who was slapped with a 15-year minimum sentence for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense.

The sobbing audiences chose the film as the best American-made documentary at the Sundance Film Festival; it was picked up by HBO and will air later this year. Hopefully it does even more, however, and forces our federal policymakers to think long and hard about our concepts of justice, mercy and rehabilitation.

Shank was eventually freed after serving nine years when she became one of more than 1,700 offenders whose sentences were commuted by President Barack Obama.

That includes Utahns like David Mortensen, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute. Or Daniel Larsen, who was serving 32 years for meth production and distribution, and had his sentence shortened to 22 years. Or Kim Beckstrom, whose life sentence was shortened to 20 years.

In all, Obama wiped away more than 13,000 years of prison sentences, which will save taxpayers $432 million for not having to incarcerate these nonviolent offenders, according to Marjorie Peerce, an attorney with Ballard Spahr’s New York office who worked on Cindy Shank’s case.

The program has been disbanded. President Donald Trump has the power to issue pardons, of course — as he did for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. But Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — a drug crusader and longtime defender of mandatory minimums — have not brought it back.

The point isn’t whether Shank was innocent — she acknowledges she was not.

She was living with a boyfriend who began using and then selling drugs. He built one of the largest drug operations in central Michigan, according to the judge in the case, before he was murdered in 2002.

Shank moved on. She married and had three daughters before she was arrested six years later. She was taken from her newborn Annalis and charged with a slew of drug-related crimes. Ultimately, many were dropped, and she was convicted of four counts of possessing large amounts of cocaine, crack and marijuana with an intent to distribute.

“When you look at the letter of the law and how conspiracy is written and what she’s charged with, she’s guilty, and we accept that,” said Rudy Valdez, Shank’s brother and the film’s director. “What did not sit well with me, with her children, with her parents and with her husband was the sentence she was given.”

Initially, prosecutors sought 89 years — a number that drew a gasp from the audience — but the judge sentenced her to 15 years because that was the mandatory minimum. The judge could give her no less.

And so her children grew up without a mother. The film opens with a phone call before her then-4-year-old Autumn’s dance recital. “When you’re dancing,” the mother says, “I’m going to lay down on my bed and close my eyes and think of you.”

Look, these cases are never black and white — and that’s the whole problem, because our laws are. We should trust judges to judge (it kind of comes with the job title, one would think).

Fortunately, there seems to be a growing push to reform our criminal justice process, and Utah has been on the cusp of that wave.

Retired U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell expressed frustration on the bench at the sentencing rules that tie judges’ hands; since stepping down, he has been a leading voice for scrapping the system.

Weldon Angelos, a Utah music producer who was sent to prison for 55 years for selling small amounts of marijuana to an informant, became the poster child against mandatory minimums and was released from prison after 13 years. He says he plans to continue fighting against such sentences.

The Utah Legislature has, in recent years, been reducing sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, focusing on rehabilitation and reintegrating people into communities.

But the real solution could lie in the Smarter Sentencing Act. The bipartisan federal bill, sponsored by Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, would give judges the flexibility they should have: to lock up violent drug kingpins, if needed, or to temper justice with mercy, when it is called for.

Utah’s delegation should take the lead in pressing the White House to restore Obama’s clemency project, and in passing Lee’s sentencing reforms, because at some point it doesn’t do society any good to have tens of thousands of people like Cindy Shank rotting behind bars while we pay to keep them there.