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The New York Times/ ­- Politics, Qua, 18 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
Abiding by the Fair Sentencing Act
The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 addressed a gross
inequity in federal sentences by reducing the disparity
in punishment for a crime involving crack versus
powdered cocaine. Previously, under a 1986 law, 50
grams of crack (the weight of a candy bar) led to a
mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years — the same
sentence that applied to 5,000 grams of powdered
cocaine (enough to fill a brief case). A street dealer of
crack cocaine often got a longer sentence than the
major trafficker who sold the powdered cocaine made
into crack. The new law cut the 100 to 1 ratio to 18 to 1
— not equalizing the penalties as it should have but
markedly reducing the difference. In two cases the
Supreme Court heard on Tuesday, the issue is
whether the sentencing law should apply to people
who were convicted of cocaine crimes, but not yet
sentenced, before it went into effect. The Justice
Department initially argued that the new rule should
apply only to crimes committed after the law was
signed. To its credit, it changed its stance in July 2011,
saying that since the goal of the law was to “rectify a
discredited policy,” the rule should apply to all
defendants sentenced after the law’s passage. This is
clearly the right way to read the law, given the
legislative history and the text, including the
“emergency authority” for the United States
Sentencing Commission to quickly put out guidelines.
A rule of leniency requires that any ambiguity in a
criminal statute be resolved in favor of defendants —
especially when the old sentencing rules resulted in
huge racial disparities, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor
pointed out. The majority of crack users are white and
Hispanic, but, as the sentencing commission reported,
in 2010 blacks made up more than three­-fourths of
those sentenced under federal crack cocaine laws.
Most were low­-level offenders. The high number of
black defendants and the disparity in treatment of
crack versus powdered cocaine led federal sentences
for blacks to jump to almost 50 percent higher than for
whites in 1990. Congress, the Obama administration
and many federal judges agree that there is a need to
correct a grossly unfair and unjustifiable sentencing
scheme. The justices should allow the 2010 law to
apply to all defendants sentenced after its enactment.
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