Congress Stood Up for Fairer Sentencing. The Supreme Court Should Too.

Today we filed a friend-of-the-court brief in two Supreme Court cases that deal with the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA), which reduced the disparity between federal mandatory minimum sentences for crack versus powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1. As we’ve written before, this was a significant step in the direction of fairness.

In Hill v. United States and Dorsey v. United States, the Court will decide whether people whose offenses predate the enactment of the FSA but who were sentenced afterwards should get the benefit of the new, fairer 18:1 ratio (the fairest ratio would be 1:1), or instead be sentenced under the old 100:1 ratio, which had no basis in science and resulted in racially biased sentencing. In our brief, we join Hill and Dorsey — as well as the Obama administration — in urging the Court to hold that Congress intended the FSA to apply in all sentencing proceedings that occur after its enactment.

The FSA was passed to correct the problems with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created a sentencing scheme that unequally punished comparable offenses involving crack and powder cocaine — two forms of the same drug. Relying on perceived differences in the harmfulness and dangerousness of crack versus powder cocaine amid media hysteria surrounding crack cocaine, the 1986 law created a 100:1 disparity between the amounts of crack versus powder cocaine necessary to trigger particular sentences. Thus, for example, someone convicted of an offense involving just five grams of crack cocaine was subject to the same five-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence as someone convicted of an offense involving 500 grams of powder cocaine. But empirical evidence has demonstrated that there is no scientific basis to support the supposed differences between crack and powder cocaine which Congress had relied upon in devising the 100:1 ratio.

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New Report: Cracked Justice Shows 13 States Persist in Outmoded Crack Cocaine Sentencing

The Sentencing Project's new report, Cracked Justice addresses disparities in cocaine sentencing in 13 states and documents efforts at the federal and state level to correct these injustices.

State cocaine sentencing disparities include:

* In Missouri, where a defendant convicted of selling six grams of crack cocaine faces the same prison term –a ten-year mandatory minimum – as someone who sells 450 grams of powder cocaine, or 75 times that amount.
* In Oklahoma, which maintains a 6-to-1 quantity-based sentencing disparity, a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence is triggered for five grams of crack cocaine and 28 grams of powder cocaine.
* In Ohio, sentencing disparities vary across felony categories based on quantity amounts. The state uses a 10-to-1 ratio of 1,000 grams of powder cocaine and 100 grams of crack cocaine for major drug offenses and imposes a ten-year mandatory minimum.

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Fair Sentencing Act An Important First Step But Sizeable Sentencing Gap Remains

WASHINGTON - July 28 - The House today passed a bill that would make much needed changes to current cocaine sentencing laws and which will now go to President Obama’s desk for signature. The bill, the Fair Sentencing Act (S. 1789), was unanimously passed by the Senate in March.

As originally introduced in the Senate, the bill would have completely eliminated the discriminatory 100:1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing under federal law. However, during the bill's markup in the Senate, a compromise was reached with Republican Senate Judiciary Committee members to reduce the disparity to an 18:1 ratio. The bill also eliminates the mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine and comes at a time when the United States Sentencing Commission is reconsidering the legitimacy and effectiveness of mandatory minimum sentencing. The commission is expected to release a new report on the subject in October.

"We commend Speaker Pelosi and Congressmen Hoyer, Clyburn, Conyers and Scott who, with the help of the Obama administration, helped this bill pass its final hurdle,” said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office. “Congress has just struck down a mandatory minimum for the first time in history and has sent the correct message that we cannot continue to use a one-size-fits-all approach to sentencing. The passage of the Fair Sentencing Act by both chambers of Congress is an important first step toward finally eliminating the sentencing disparity. However, the bill does leave in place a sizable sentencing disparity that we will continue to work to eliminate.”

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