Sessions advises strictest charges
He scraps policy of ex-AG Holder
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions has overturned criminal-charging policies of President Barack Obama’s administration, instructing the nation’s federal prosecutors to bring the toughest charges possible against most crime suspects.
The move was assailed by critics as a return to failed drug-war policies that unduly affected members of minority groups and filled prisons with nonviolent offenders.
Sessions, a former federal prosecutor during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic who has promised to make combating violence and drugs the Justice Department’s top priority, made the announcement Friday.
“This policy affirms our responsibility to enforce the law, is moral and just, and produces consistency,” Sessions wrote in a memo
to U.S. attorneys made public early Friday.
The policy signaled a return to “enforcing the laws that Congress has passed,” Sessions said Friday in a speech at the Justice Department, characterizing his memo as unique for the leeway it afforded federal prosecutors around the country.
“They deserve to be unhandcuffed and not micromanaged from Washington,” he said. “It means we are going to meet our responsibility to enforce the law with judgment and fairness. It’s simply the right and moral thing to do.”
The Sessions memo marks the first significant criminal justice effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to bring back the toughest practices of the drug war, which had fallen out of favor in recent years with a bipartisan movement to undo the damaging effects of mass incarceration.
“This policy fully utilizes the tools Congress has given us,” the attorney general’s memo says. “By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.”
Advocates warned the shift would crowd federal prisons and strain Justice Department resources. Some involved in criminal justice during the drug war feared the human impact would look similar.
“It ruined families and took away a large number of African-American men from their communities at their prime working years,” said Georgetown law professor Paul Butler, who was a federal prosecutor during the 1990s. “You had people who weren’t able to be responsible fathers for their kids, who weren’t able to serve a couple of years for making a mistake, then come home and do better. That’s the era Jeff Sessions wants to return us to.”
The announcement is an undoing of criminal justice policies under Obama’s administration, which aimed to ease overcrowding in federal prisons and contributed to a national rethinking of how drug criminals were prosecuted and sentenced.
Sessions contends a spike in violence in some big cities and the nation’s opioid epidemic show the need for a return to tougher tactics. He foreshadowed the plan early in his tenure, when he signaled his strong support for the federal government’s continued use of private prisons, reversing another Obama directive to phase out their use.
“We know that drugs and crime go hand in hand,” Sessions said in his Friday speech. “Drug trafficking is an inherently violent business. If you want to collect a drug debt, you can’t file a lawsuit in court. You collect it by the barrel of a gun.”
The policy memo says prosecutors should “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” — something more likely to trigger mandatory minimum sentences.
The memo concedes there will be cases in which “good judgment” will warrant a prosecutor veering from that rule. And Sessions said prosecutors maintain “discretion to avoid sentences that would result in an injustice.”
But any exceptions will need to be approved by top supervisors, and the reasons must be documented, allowing the Justice Department to track the handling of such cases by its 94 U.S. attorney’s offices.
And even if they opt not to pursue the most serious charges, prosecutors are still required to provide judges with all the details of a case when defendants are sen- tenced, which could lengthen prison terms.
HOLDER RESPONDS
The directive rescinds guidance by Sessions’ Democratic predecessor, Eric Holder, who told prosecutors they could in some cases leave drug quantities out of charging documents so as not to charge suspects with crimes that trigger long sentences.
Holder’s 2013 initiative, known as “Smart on Crime,” was aimed at encouraging shorter sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and preserving Justice Department resources for more serious and violent criminals.
In a statement Friday, Holder called the reversal “dumb on crime,” saying it would be “financially ruinous” for the department to focus its spending on incarceration rather than preventing and investigating crime.
“It is an ideologically cookie-cutter approach that has only been proven to generate unfairly long sentences that are often applied indiscriminately and do little to achieve longterm public safety,” Holder said.
The Obama policy shift coincided with U.S. Sentencing Commission changes that made tens of thousands of federal drug prisoners eligible for early release, and a clemency initiative that freed convicts deemed deserving of a second chance. Combined, those changes led to a steep decline in a federal prison population that now stands at just under 190,000, down from nearly 220,000 in 2013. Nearly half of those inmates are in custody for drug crimes, records show.
Obama officials cited that decline and a drop in the overall number of drug prosecutions as evidence that policies were working as intended. They argued prosecutors were getting pickier about the cases they were bringing and were seeking mandatory minimum sentences less often.
Still, some prosecutors felt constrained by the Holder directive and expressed concern that they’d lose plea-bargaining leverage — and a key inducement for cooperation — without the ability to more freely pursue mandatory minimum sentences.
Sessions recently ordered the Justice Department to review all its policy agreements with troubled police departments across the country — which he says stand in the way of tough policing — and marijuana advocates fear he might crack down on the drug even in states that have legalized it.
The reversal restores prosecutors’ tools to go after drug traffickers and gangs, said Lawrence Leiser, head of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys.
Sessions has remained an advocate for longer sentences, even as efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system secured bipartisan support in recent years. He argues Holder’s approach sidestepped federal laws that impose such sentences and created inconsistency across the country in the way defendants are punished.
The Sessions memo was largely crafted by Steven Cook, a federal prosecutor who was president of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys and is now detailed to the Justice Department. Cook was a harsh critic of the Obama administration’s criminal justice policies. The implementation of Sessions’ memo will be overseen by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Cook has said that the Holder memo “handcuffed prosecutors” and it limited when “enhancements” can be used to increase penalties, an important leverage when dealing with a career offender and getting them to cooperate. Information for this article was contributed by Errin Haines Whack of The Associated Press; by Sari Horwitz and Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post; and by Rebecca R. Ruiz of The New York Times.