What happened next, did. The Department of Justice appealed the sentences, won in the 9th Circuit, and is forcing the men to return to prison after they thought they had done their time. Both will now serve the mandatory-minimum sentence.

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When HBO’s John Oliver broadcasts a polemical monologue, its subject is invariably something that America’s Blue Tribe—Americans whose place on the cultural and ideological left forms a core part of their identity—regards as idiotic, evil, or both. Last Week Tonight helps its audience indulge in collective outrage.

Earlier this year, Oliver skewered mandatory minimums. The laws “require judges to punish certain crimes with a minimum number of years in prison, regardless of context,” he explained, “which is a little strange, because context is important.” He added that “they’re partly responsible for the explosion of our prison population,” noting that many judges oppose them because they hand power over sentencing to prosecutors, who frequently “use the threat of long mandatory minimums to convince defendants to take a plea bargain or cooperate by giving information.”

The segment even highlighted the sort of people given mandatory minimums that Last Week Tonight’s target demographic was likely to find sympathetic: men and women, some with children, given long sentences in a drug war the blue tribe regards as unjust and pointless. Most every major media outlet on the center-left has run some version of that story over the last several years, and liberals and progressives eagerly shared Oliver’s takedown and its predecessors on social media.

I loved the segment.

Mandatory minimums really are objectionable as a matter of principle, as a policy that has resulted in countless individual injustices, and as a significant driver of over-incarceration.

In theory, those on the left who care about vanquishing mandatory minimums could have used the news story about the Hammonds to broaden awareness and opposition to the practice among members of the Red Tribe. Libertarian intellectuals oppose mandatory minimums. Why not the populist right, too? Some folks in rural areas who’ve never known about the laws, or think that they only affect people in cities, might change their minds if they were to find out that what happened to the Hammonds is routine; that many Americans have suffered far more egregious sentences; and that mandatory minimums affect all sorts of defendants.

Yes, the Oregon protestors have a larger agenda about the management of federal lands in the West and the degree to which they ought to be under local control.

Still, in their opposition to mandatory minimums, they share common ground with the left.

As Jacob Sullum explains, the judge who tried to impose lesser sentences on the Hammonds chose punishments “within the ranges recommended by federal sentencing guidelines that would have applied but for the statutory minimum.” In doing so, he argued that mandatory-minimum laws run afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, legal reasoning that surely appeals to at least some leftist opponents of mandatory minimums.