Darryl Lorenzo Wellington: Let me remind you who Jeff Sessions is

  For the past several weeks, media coverage of Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a sympathetic turn. In article after article, the “beleaguered” Sessions is described as a victim of bullying, under Twitter assault by the president who appointed him. Meanwhile, Trump—angry that the law-and-order man he chose did not live up to his idea of loyalty—seems to be taking some joy in Sessions’ discomfort.

  I have been reading about Sessions with a kind of perverse fascination—but I have not read anything that makes me feel sorry for him. The things he stands for—the things he has stood for over the course of his decades-long career—are abhorrent. The President’s mean tweets haven’t made Sessions’ brand of law enforcement any kinder to poor and black and brown people.

Katherine Robertson: The evolution of mandatory minimums

  Mandatory minimums, when assigned to a crime in the penal code, set the lowest available punishment that a judge may sentence an offender to for a specified crime. Typically a defined term of imprisonment, mandatory minimums have been in place and utilized by our national and state criminal justice systems since the early days of the United States.

  The very first mandatory minimum terms of imprisonment were enacted by Congress in 1798 as part of the Sedition Act and imposed a minimum sentence of six months for “opposing or impeding a federal officer by means of insurrection, riot, or unlawful assembly.”