SENTENCING FAIRNESS

JUSTICE is supposed to be blind, especially color-blind. But legal and
civil rights advocates have agreed that hasn't been the case in
sentencing crack cocaine offenders. Usually they have been black, and
usually they have received harsher penalties than middle-class white
offenders convicted in powdered cocaine cases.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission, an agency of the federal judicial
branch, is finally moving to correct this inequity.

For years, groups have lobbied for parity in sentencing for crack and
powdered cocaine offenders. Crack cocaine is potentially more
addictive, but its chemical properties are the same as powdered
cocaine. Crack appeals more to the poor, many of whom are minorities,
because it is less expensive. It's only right that the commission try
for consistency in sentencing. Last spring it set more lenient
sentencing guidelines to be issued to crack cocaine offenders in the
future. Now it is weighing retroactively reducing sentences of crack
inmates in federal prisons.

That would be the right thing to do, even though we don't condone
crack or powdered cocaine use at all. Cocaine destroys those who use
it. But there is no place for unfair sentencing in America, and there
is a wide consensus among many federal judges, public defenders, and
parole officers that penalties for crack fall disproportionately on
African-Americans.

Moreover, there is a precedent for the commission to reduce sentences
and make a policy retroactive. In fact, the panel, which was created
in 1984 to bring consistency to sentencing in federal courts, did
precisely that when it applied new sentencing guidelines in cases
involving LSD, the cultivation of marijuana, and the painkiller OxyContin.

Under the new proposal, the sentences of 19,500 inmates could be
reduced by an average of 27 months. It would apply only to those in
federal prisons, not state facilities, where most drug offenders are
incarcerated. Prison doors won't just start swinging open, though.
Former inmates would go to halfway houses first.

The Bush Administration opposes the proposal, but the President can't
make the claim that this is a liberal body. Its voting members include
four persons named by President Bush and three named by former
President Clinton. Nonvoting members include the Attorney General and
the chairman of the U.S. Parole Commission.

The chairman, Ricardo H. Hinojosa, nominated to that post by President
Reagan, asked Congress to ease crack sentencing guidelines earlier
this year. He said the racial differences between crack and other
cocaine users set an unwarranted disparity, and he was right.

Whenever unfairness is identified in American justice, it must be
rooted out. It is encouraging in this case that a new policy from the
commission seems about to do just that, and the states should be
encouraged to follow suit.