At every stage of the criminal justice process, mandatory minimums contribute to disparate impact among racial groups. They encourage policing practices, investigative techniques, and prosecutorial strategies that are illogical, counterintuitive, and sometimes arbitrary and abusive. The ultimate example of how mandatory minimums have fostered prosecutorial excess is the unfettered prosecutorial discretion to disregard those minimums for so-called cooperators. This essay provides a practitioner’s view of how mandatory mini-mum sentences diminish fairness and contribute to arbitrary justice.