FIRST SHOT: CRACK-DOWN LETS UP

A Supreme Court Decision Attacks Inequity In The Drug Sentencing Guidelines.

The U.S.'s system of checks and balances is under seige, but it was
still lurching along late in December as the Supreme Court
disappointed the White House with a ruling in a crack case. In a 7-2
decision, the justices said judges did not have to stick to federal
guidelines that prescribe the same sentence for the sale of five
grams of crack as for the sale of 500 grams of powdered cocaine.

The 100-to-1 ratio has long been the target of outraged protests by
people opposing mandatory minimum sentences, and by black community
leaders and lawmakers, who often had the crack laws in mind when
they said that the war on drugs was really a war on young black men.

Among the latter is state Rep. Ben Swan of Springfield, who has been
fighting the disparity ever since the law mandating it was passed in
1986. It was an opportunistic measure, pushed through without much
study after basketball star Len Bias's death from an overdose of
cocaine sparked a move by Democrats-led by legendary Rep. Tip
O'Neill of Massachusetts-to one-up the Republicans by appearing
tough on drugs. By 1995, hundreds of black people had been charged
with crack-related crimes under the law, but no white people.

That year the U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended reducing the
100-to-1 disparity, but Congress refused. In 2002 the Commission
repeated the recommendation, pointing out that facts did not bear
out the alleged connection between crack and violence that had
been used as an argument for the disparity.

In the year 2000, the Commission found, 75 percent of crack
offenders had used no weapons. Furthermore, its inquiries showed,
crack arrests seldom netted important figures in the drug trade.
Other findings cast doubt on earlier beliefs that crack was vastly
more addictive than powdered cocaine.

But a major concern of the Commission was that "the overwhelming
majority of offenders subject to the heightened crack cocaine
penalties are black, about 85 percent in 2000. This has contributed
to a widely held perception that the current penalties structure
promotes unwarranted disparity based on race."

Front and center in the case that brought the High Court's new
ruling was a black man, Derrick Kimbrough, who had been convicted on
charges involving crack and powdered cocaine in Virginia. The
guidelines called for a prison term of 19 to 22 years because of the
crack; the trial judge gave Kimbrough 15 years, citing
the Commission's concerns that the crack law is most often applied
to minor offenders, especially minority members. A federal appeals
court struck down the judge's ruling, but the Supreme Court held that
the judge had not abused his discretion.

On his way home from the Conference of the National Caucus of Black
State Legislators in Little Rock, Ark., Swan called the Advocate to
say that the Supreme Court ruling was "a major move in improving the
criminal justice system." The notoriously disproportionate
100-to-one ratio was politically unassailable in its early years,
Swan said: "Some of us have been trying to change these sentencing
guidelines and we had difficulty because there are people in both
parties who fear being seen as soft on crime."

And it wasn't just a liberal vs. conservative issue, he explained:
"It is the quasi-conservatives that I have trouble with. If you are
truly conservative, you will try to correct disparities in the law.
I've been fighting this for 15 years or more. Sometimes we
live long enough to see progress made."