Reducing Unjust Cocaine Sentences - NY Times
June 29, 2011
The 1986 federal drug law that punished people caught with crack cocaine far more severely than those caught with powder cocaine was a disaster on many levels. It undermined faith in the justice system by discriminating against poor and mainly minority crack users and favoring affluent white users who preferred the chemically identical powdered form.
Congress tinkered at the margins of the law but failed to eliminate the sentencing disparity when it passed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. Now Republican lawmakers are trying to compound a longstanding injustice by opposing a proposal that would allow some people sentenced under the original law to apply for reductions in their prison terms.
The original law was grossly unjust. It mandated a minimum 10-year sentence for anyone caught with 50 grams of crack — about the weight of a candy bar. To get a comparable sentence, a person arrested for powdered cocaine would have to be caught with 5,000 grams — enough to fill a briefcase.
Instead of equalizing sentences when it revisited the issue in 2010, Congress lowered the penalties for some crack offenses and reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powered cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1.
The United States Sentencing Commission, which sets federal guidelines, has issued temporary sentencing rules for people who were convicted of offenses after the new law took effect last fall. The commission is also empowered to determine if people convicted of trafficking under the original law should be eligible to apply for limited sentence reductions.
The commission has allowed retroactive reductions in other cases. If it votes to do so at a meeting scheduled for Thursday, about 12,000 federal inmates could become eligible to apply for an average reduction of 37 months.
Republican lawmakers, however, are trying to intimidate the commission into rejecting retroactivity. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, for example, has threatened to require the commission to pay the administrative costs of reducing sentences out of its budget. The commission should ignore this harassment and vote in favor of sentencing fairness.