A state appeals court threw out a convict’s 7-year prison sentence on Monday because a controversial former judge told the man to expect no rehabilitation because the state’s prisons “just warehouse people.”
Cook County Judge Leo Holt made the comments in 2004 at a sentencing hearing for William Lang, whom a jury had convicted of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon by a felon.
Calling Holt’s remarks “inexplicable,” a three-judge panel of the 1st District Appellate Court in Chicago vacated the sentence and ordered Lang to be resentenced by another judge.
State law requires that judges passing sentence consider each offender’s potential for rehabilitation, Judge Robert Cahill wrote for the panel in a seven-page opinion. But Holt’s remarks were at odds with that notion.
“The penitentiary is not [a way] for you to go and expect to find anything of a rehabilitative nature,” Holt said at Lang’s sentencing. “We just warehouse people in penitentiaries. We don’t rehabilitate them…. The Department of Corrections … doesn’t consider itself to be a rehabilitative institution.”
Holt went on to criticize what he called the “prison industry.”
“So, for you, sentencing you to the penitentiary is simply to isolate you and take you out of society, and I think in many instances for the benefit [of] those who work in the prison industry because they need bodies in prison,” Holt said, according to the Appellate Court opinion. “It’s a huge industry, and if you collapse it by staying out of the penitentiary, you will collapse the economy all around this country.”
Lang argued on appeal that he was denied a fair sentencing hearing because Holt didn’t consider his potential to be rehabilitated. Prosecutors urged the court to uphold the sentence, arguing that Holt’s comments concerned the prison system in general and not Lang in particular.
“The remarks may have been appropriate if made in a speech on prison reform to a bar association,” Cahill wrote. “But they are inexplicable at a sentencing hearing…. Sentencing is the most solemn power a judge possesses.”
Holt was 77 when he retired from the bench in 2004. He could not be reached Monday for comment.
Some of his decisions have sparked controversy. In 2004, Holt angered police when he set bail at $100,000 for a reputed gang leader charged with murder.
In 2003, Holt gave probation, rather than a jail term, to William Ligue Jr., who had run onto the field and attacked a coach during a White Sox game.
Prosecutors had asked that Ligue be sentenced to 2 to 5 years in prison.
———-
More Top Picks Best Dry Erase Boards For Adhd Planning