Pubdate: Tue, 13 Nov 2007
Source: News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)
Copyright: 2007 The News and Observer Publishing Company
Contact: http://www.newsobserver.com/484/story/433256.html
Website: http://www.news-observer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/304
Author: Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)

CRACK CONVICTS MAY GET OUT EARLY

Judges, Others See Sentences As Unfair

WASHINGTON - Under pressure from federal judges, inmate advocacy 
groups and civil rights organizations, federal authorities are 
considering a sweeping cut in prison sentences that could bring early 
release for thousands of federal inmates.

The proposal being weighed by the U.S. Sentencing Commission would 
shave an average of at least two years off the sentences of 19,500 
federal prisoners, about 1 in 10 in the 200,000-inmate system. More 
than 2,500 of them, mainly those who have already served lengthy 
sentences, would be eligible for release within a year if the rule is adopted.

Such a mass commutation would be unprecedented: No other single rule 
in the two-decade history of the Sentencing Commission has affected 
nearly so many inmates. And no single law or act of presidential 
clemency, such as grants of amnesty to draft resisters and 
conscientious objectors after World War II and the Vietnam War, has 
affected so many people at one time. The far-reaching move is aimed 
at addressing what is seen as an unfair disparity in the effect of 
federal cocaine laws dating to the mid-1980s. The laws imposed much 
harsher punishment on people who use and sell crack cocaine than on 
those who use and sell powder cocaine. About 80 percent of people 
sentenced on federal crack charges every year are black. Sounding 
alarm bells The Justice Department is warning of dire consequences if 
the proposal goes through, including the possibility that returning 
thousands of serious drug offenders to the streets will compound a 
recent increase in violent crime across the country.

"The unexpected release of 20,000 prisoners ... would jeopardize 
community safety and threaten to unravel the success we have achieved 
in removing violent crack offenders from high crime neighborhoods," 
the department said in a letter to the commission this month.

The congressionally chartered commission, which sets sentencing 
guidelines for federal judges, has already adopted the reduced 
penalties for new crack cases hitting the courts effective Nov. 1. 
That decision alone will affect about 4,000 a cases a year. The 
debate now is about its plans to make those changes retroactive to 
inmates already in prison. The seven-member commission is considering 
the proposal at a hearing today; a vote is expected sometime next year.

A wave of fear Congress started enacting tougher penalties for crack 
in the 1980s at the height of public fears about spreading street 
violence associated with the drug. There was also concern that crack 
was more dangerous and addictive than powder cocaine.

The distinction became embedded in federal law and in the guidelines 
that the sentencing commission promulgated for two decades. For 
example, it takes 100 times more powder cocaine than crack to trigger 
mandatory five- and 10-year prison terms under federal law.

Most experts now believe that the penalties exaggerate the relative 
harmfulness of crack compared with powder cocaine. Another concern is 
that setting such low thresholds for punishing crack offenders has 
led to the lengthy imprisonment of low-level street dealers, couriers 
and lookouts, rather than major drug traffickers.

The disparity is now under siege on several fronts. There is 
bipartisan legislation in Congress that would narrow the penalties 
for crack compared with powder cocaine. The Supreme Court is 
considering a case this term that would give judges even more 
discretion to reduce sentences in crack cases. 'Fundamentally unjust' 
The widely differing treatment of crack offenders is "fundamentally 
unjust," said Reggie B. Walton, a federal judge in Washington. As a 
top White House drug-control official in the 1980s, Walton advocated 
for tougher sentences in crack cases. But he said the penalties in 
hindsight have become too severe. Walton is testifying at the hearing 
today on behalf of the policy-making arm of the federal courts, which 
supports the sentencing proposal.

Inmate advocacy groups, such as Families against Mandatory Minimums, 
are being flooded with calls about the new sentencing-commission 
proposal. Mary Price, the general counsel of the Washington-based 
group, says a co-worker has two sons in prison who would benefit from 
the sentencing change. "It is one of the very important civil rights 
issues of our day," said Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP 
Washington office, which has long pushed for reform of cocaine laws.

Fallen athlete The potential beneficiaries include the likes of 
Willie Mays Aikens, a former Major League Baseball star with the 
Kansas City Royals, who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison 
in 1994 for selling 63 grams of crack to an undercover police officer.

His case illustrates the powerful effect that the crack-powder divide 
can have: If the charges against him had involved a similar amount of 
powder cocaine, he would have received a sentence of no more than 27 
months. Now, if the sentencing-commission proposal passes, he would 
be eligible for release in 2009, about three years earlier than his 
current release date, says his attorney, Margaret Love.
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