JUSTICE IN SENTENCING

With a pair of 7-2 rulings this week, the Supreme Court struck a blow
for basic fairness and judicial independence. The court restored a
vital measure of discretion to federal trial judges to impose
sentences based on their assessment of a particular crime and
defendant rather than being forced to adhere to overarching guidelines.

Beyond that, one of the rulings highlighted the longstanding
injustice of federal guidelines and statutes imposing much longer
sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine, which is most often
found in impoverished communities, than for offenses involving the
chemically identical powdered cocaine, which is popular among more
affluent users.

The rulings provide fresh impetus for Congress to rewrite the
grotesquely unfair crack cocaine laws on which the federal sentencing
guidelines are partly based. Those laws are a relic of the 1980s,
when it was widely but wrongly believed that the crack form of
cocaine was more dangerous than the powder form. We are pleased that
the United States Sentencing Commission recently called for reducing
sentences for some categories of offenders and has now called for
applying the change retroactively. The real work still lies with
Congress, which needs to rewrite the law.

Building on a 2005 decision that held the sentencing guidelines to be
advisory rather than mandatory, the new rulings affirm that the
guidelines are but one factor to be considered by a trial judge in
arriving at an individual sentence, and that an appeals court must
have a strong reason to overturn that sentence.

In one of the cases, the justices supported a district judge in
Virginia who gave a military veteran convicted of crack dealing a
sentence of 15 years, rather than the 19-22 years that the guidelines
recommended. The ruling described the federal crack law as
"disproportionate and unjust." Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg stated that it would not be an abuse of a discretion
for a trial judge to conclude that the crack/powder disparity
resulted in a longer-than-necessary sentence for a particular defendant.

In the other case, the court found that a trial judge was within his
rights to impose a light sentence on a man briefly involved in
selling the drug Ecstasy while in college. In reviewing sentences,
wrote Justice John Paul Stevens for the majority, appellate courts
must apply a deferential abuse-of-discretion standard to trial
judges' decisions.

There is a danger that the new procedures outlined by the court could
end up making federal sentences unfairly disparate across the
country, undermining one of the important objectives of having
sentencing guidelines in the first place. If that happens, Congress
will have to address the problem. For the moment, the Supreme Court's
latest adjustment in sentencing strikes us as a positive development,
one with much potential for advancing justice.