Durbin's Bid to End Sentencing Disparity
The sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine is a disgrace. It's time to end it, not mend it.
Adam Serwer | March 11, 2010 | web only
The sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine is a national disgrace. Both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have called for it to be ended, and prominent Republicans like Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn have indicated they're sympathetic to the idea.
Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider the Fair Sentencing Act, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's proposal to eliminate the disparity entirely.
"It is plainly unjust to hand down wildly disparate prison sentences for materially similar crimes," Holder said at a D.C. Court of Appeals Judicial Conference last summer. "It is unjust to have a sentencing disparity that disproportionately and illogically affects some racial groups."
Under current federal law, it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same mandatory minimum sentence as 5 grams of crack cocaine. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed at a time when both black and white lawmakers wrongly believed that crack cocaine was more dangerous than powder cocaine. An absurdity, the law means that a high-level drug trafficker carrying hundreds of grams of powder cocaine is sentenced more lightly than a retail drug dealer on the corner with a rock in his sock.
more...
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=durbins_bid_to_end_sentencing_disparity
UPDATE: Nevermind...
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped
Senate Says No To Ending Crack Disparity.
Earlier this morning, Senator Dick Durbin announced that he and Senator Jeff Sessions had reached a "compromise" in the Senate gym over Durbin's bill, which would have eliminated the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity for crack vs. powder cocaine.
snip//
The Judiciary Committee passed the bill, which will go to the full Senate for a floor vote. Instead of eliminating the crack/powder disparity, which practically everyone in the committee acknowledged disproportionately affects black Americans, the senators opted to make the law one-fifth as racist as it used to be.
The Senators on the committee spent the rest of the markup complimenting each other on all they had achieved with their bipartisanship.
-- A. Serwer
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