REHABBING MISGUIDED DRUG LAWS

The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week restored common sense and
fairness to punishing some crimes by allowing judges wider discretion
to depart from federal guidelines that had hamstrung them in doing
what judges are supposed to do - use their knowledge, wisdom and
experience to mete out justice.

In a pair of decisive 7-2 rulings, the high court also restored some
judicial independence that had been stripped by Congress' adoption of
sentencing and drug laws more than two decades ago, including statutes
that deemed the public threat from crack cocaine was more insidious
than that of powder cocaine by mandating stiffer penalties for
convictions for defendants involved in the crack trade.

It was patently ridiculous, as lawmakers insinuated in 1986, that
crack cocaine was 100 times more dangerous than its powdered cousin,
despite the two drugs' identical chemical composition.

One highly sensationalized aspect of the drug industry at the time was
the addiction and violence in inner cities associated with crack.
Lawmakers undoubtedly wanted to rescue these areas by stopping the
flow of both drugs and violence with tougher laws.

But the result was a system that was blatantly unfair to black
defendants, who comprise some 85 percent of defendants convicted of
crack-related offenses - although powder cocaine use runs nearly five
times that of crack, according to a 2003 government study. Congress'
intent was understandable, but illegal drugs that are just different
forms of the same chemicals must be treated the same, and should have
been all along.

The day after the rulings, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which
creates the standards that ruled judges' decisions on punishment for
years, voted to reduce the sentences for nearly 20,000 inmates
convicted under the old system. That, coupled with Congress' new
efforts to reverse the sentencing disparity created by the 1980s laws,
are welcome maneuvers to rehabilitate the justice system.

The other ruling, again in a drug-related case, permits judges to go
below the "advisory" guidelines, a questionable adjective since judges
stayed within the recommendations more than 86 percent of the time.
While there appears to be some debate among scholars as to whether
judges will actually wean themselves off the guidelines, at least now
they have the authority and freedom to do so.

Our nation's War on Drugs has in many ways been an expensive and
colossal failure, failing to stem both the supply and availability of
drugs, while filling our prisons with countless otherwise non-violent
offenders.

The Supreme Court, however, has corrected some of the more misguided
policies from that conflict. The rest is now up to Congress.