GREATER FAIRNESS

New sentencing guidelines mean that a handful of convicted drug
dealers may spend less time in prison than their earlier sentences
might have indicated. Some of these inmates had done business in the
Rutland region, and their potential release may be raising alarms.

But the new guidelines do not represent a sudden surrender on drugs.
Rather, they mean that our drug laws are not as warped as they were
by inequities caused by racism. Convicted drug dealers do time in
prison, and then they are released. The new guidelines bring greater
fairness to the duration of the inmates' imprisonment.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission modified federal sentencing guidelines
last year because of the disparate treatment of defendants accused of
dealing crack cocaine and powder cocaine. A defendant caught with
crack could have received a sentence equivalent to the sentence for
someone with 100 times the amount of powder cocaine. In other words,
a smalltime crack dealer could receive a sentence appropriate for a
big-time powder cocaine dealer.

Because crack has been more prevalent among African-Americans,
critics have charged that the disparity in sentencing was motivated
by racism, or at least that its effect was to subject
African-Americans to unduly harsh treatment. The Sentencing
Commission has been urging Congress to change the law, but that
hasn't happened. Instead, the commission changed its guidelines, and
it applied those changes retroactively.

That means that people already serving time because of drug
convictions can apply to the court to have their sentences reduced in
accordance with the new guidelines. That has raised the prospect that
some of about 24 inmates now in federal prison on crimes committed
in Vermont might see their sentences reduced by a few months or years.

For example, Demetrius Collins was convicted of dealing crack cocaine
in Rutland in 2003, and he received a sentence of 20 years. The new
guidelines might reduce that sentence by from one to four years.
Collins has applied to federal court for a sentence reduction.

If the price of fairness is to reduce a 20-year sentence to a
sentence of 16 to 19 years, it is a price the people of Vermont and
the United States can pay. It is a hefty sentence in any event.

Federal prosecutors wanted to make sure that the judges looking at
the resentencing cases would examine the circumstances of each
inmate. For example, the prosecutor argued that an inmate from
Bennington, Christopher Main, not receive a reduced sentence because
of a long history of violence, robbery and dealing of heavy drugs.

Fair enough. Each case should be considered on its merits. The new
guidelines allow judges greater freedom to determine sentences
without an arbitrary requirement that hits one racial group harder
than others. Vermont needs to remain vigilant against drug dealers
here to exploit the vulnerabilities of young Vermonters. It needs
to do so in ways now broadly accepted in Vermont: a combination of
prevention, enforcement, and treatment.

Racially biased sentencing guidelines have no place in the battle to
contain the harm of drugs. Judge William B. Sessions III, a federal
judge in Vermont who is vice chairman of the Sentencing Commission,
has had a role in bringing greater sanity to the federal guidelines.
The nation gains from those changes by bringing greater justice to
the justice system.