REDUCING UNJUST COCAINE SENTENCES

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.