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The New York Times
U.S. Panel Cuts Jail
Terms
for Crimes Tied to
Crack
By DAVID STOUT,
nytimes.com on the Web, December 11, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The United
States Sentencing Commission voted unanimously today to lighten punishments
retroactively for crimes related to crack cocaine, a decision that could affect
some 19,500 federal inmates.
The decision, which was made over the objections of the Bush administration,
takes effect on March 3, 2008, and it will not mean automatic release for those
serving time. But it does open the door for them to apply for sentence
adjustments and possible earlier release.
The commission previously had voted to recommend shorter prison sentences for
crack cocaine offenders. Those guidelines went into effect on Nov. 1, but
the commission postponed a vote on whether to make them retroactive.
The commission’s vote addressed what many analysts have come to see as a deeply
unfair consequence of the decades-long war on drugs and the drug-sentencing laws
adopted in the mid-1980s, when the fear of drug-induced street violence had a
profound effect on public policy and personal behavior. A 2002 commission
report noted that 85 percent of defendants convicted of crack offenses were
black, a fact the commission warned was leading to a loss of confidence in the
fairness of the justice system.
For a time, crack cocaine was thought to be far more dangerous than powdered
cocaine, prompting lawmakers to make crack-related penalties much harsher.
As a result, black defendants and their families were affected
disproportionately, since crack is used predominantly by blacks and powdered
cocaine by whites.
The Bush administration has opposed easing crack sentences retroactively, just
as it earlier opposed retroactively lightening punishments for those committing
crimes related to LSD or marijuana.
The sentencing commission earlier had said that applying its new guidelines
retroactively could reduce the average sentence by about 27 months and that
about 2,500 prisoners could be released within one year. The remaining
eligible inmates could receive proportional reductions, depending on the length
of their sentences, with most getting fewer than 24 months off, but some getting
49 months or more trimmed from their sentences.
“There’s a lot of people’s lives who are dependent on this,” said Julie Stewart,
founder of a group that advocates easing what it sees as unduly harsh sentences
for drug-related crimes.
Today’s action by the sentencing commission was not unexpected, in view of a
pair of Supreme Court decisions handed down on Monday that reinforce the
discretionary powers of federal district court judges in deciding what
punishment to impose. One of those decisions practically invited judges to
disagree with those guidelines that call for far longer sentences for
crack-related offenses than for crimes associated with powdered cocaine.
The new guidelines to reduce the disparities between punishments for crack and
those for powdered cocaine will reduce the average sentence for crack possession
to 8 years 10 months from 10 years 1 month.
Congress sets federal criminal statutes and could have stopped the new
guidelines from taking effect. But the lawmakers did not, and once they
were in place it became the commission’s decision to apply them retroactively or
not.
Erasing the differences between sentences for the different types of cocaine is
only part of the solution to unjust punishment, said Ms. Stewart, founder of
Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The real solution, she said, is to
persuade Congress to abolish the mandatory minimums — that is, mandatory stays
in prison — for certain crimes.
“Where we go from here is Capitol Hill,” she said.
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