That does look like a well-considered perspective, though perhaps a little extreme. Judges are given some flexibility, called "judicial discretion". (But I don't know how this may vary across the different kinds of courts.) Some judges abuse their power; maybe they are exercising some wrong kind of discretion.
Though I'm no expert, I'll offer a scenario anyway -- something I've seen in the news somewhere:
There is a "3-strikes" law. A wide array of crimes appear to qualify as "strikes". If someone committed armed robbery and severely wounded a few people, in three such incidents, then we'd want a severe penalty because the crimes are repeated and severe. However, some people get "strikes" for minor offenses, leading to very severe penalties for very mild offenses.
I'm looking it up now: I find this:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/supreme-court-strikes-down-unconstitutional-three-strikes-law/207222/. The final line in it is: "[N]o one should [serve] a life-sentence for bouncing checks!"
Now, the really proper way to address this, I think, is that legislatures should have passed better laws in the first place, and when they passed 3-strikes laws, they didn't get it quite right. The legislative remedy is that the legislature would have to revise the law as soon as possible and probably apply the revision retroactively. I believe the legislatures are sometimes rather slow to correct their mistakes.
Now, given that there is such a law which sometimes leads to over-severe consequences, and the law is written such that the over-severe consequences (very long prison terms) are mandatory in a wide array of circumstances, then I would like there to be, at least, some judicial discretion in the sentencing, such that the sentence might be softened if the offenses were minor or had mitigating circumstances. (I'm imagining this as a bench trial -- I'm not sure how this would play out in a jury trial, but the principles should be the same.) But if the legislature wrote mandatory very-severe sentences with no flexibility, in the law, then the judge would have no choice but to apply the extremely severe sentence, hence it's been characterized in that article as "a life-sentence for bouncing checks".
I wish I didn't have to trust a judge with anything, however, I'd prefer judicial discretion rather than a completely rigid "life-sentence for bouncing checks" kind of situation.
Another scenario is (historically, and depending on which state one is in) very long prison sentences for possessing small amounts of marijuana -- I think there needs to be some way to ease up on those kinds of nonviolent offenders, even when legislatures passed really draconian laws about them.
There are lots of situations where a person might be found with small amounts of marijuana, even some situations where the person didn't even know it was there.
Not only do I wish I didn't have to trust judges (nor juries), I also don't trust some of these legislatures to get everything right. The whole government is just something we have to work with because we'd be worse off without a government. So we need measured amounts of trust, and we continually try to make the government and laws better somehow.
That does look like a well-considered perspective,... (