Sessions issues order for harshest penalties
Policy is reversal of Obama era; ex-AG Holder blasts edict.
In reversal of Obama-era policy, attorney general says it’s “right and moral” to impose toughest charges, sentences on criminals.
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered federal prosecutors late Thursday to pursue the toughest possible charges and sentences against crime suspects, reversing Obama administration efforts to ease penalties for some nonviolent drug violations.
The drastic shift in criminal justice policy, foreshadowed during recent weeks, is Sessions’ first major stamp on the Justice Department, and it highlights several of his top targets: drug dealing, gun crime and gang violence. The Justice Department released the new directives Friday.
In an eight-paragraph memo to the nation’s prosecutors, Sessions returned to the guidance of President George W. Bush’s administration by calling for more uniform punishments — including mandatory minimum sentences — and directing prosecutors to pursue the strictest possible charges. Sessions’ policy, however, is broader than that of the Bush administration, and will be more reliant on the judgments of U.S. attorneys and assistant attorneys general.
The policy signaled a return to “enforcing the laws that Congress has passed,” Sessions said Friday at the Justice Department, characterizing his memo as unique for the leeway it afforded federal prosecutors around the country.
“They deserve to be un-handcuffed 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 guidance allowed for limited exceptions. “There will be circumstances in which good judgment would lead a prosecutor to conclude that a strict application of the above charging policy is not warranted,” Sessions wrote.
His memo replaced the orders of former Attorney General Eric Holder, who in 2013 encouraged prosecutors to consider the individual circumstances of a case and to exercise discretion in charging drug crimes. Holder directed prosecutors — when considering nonviolent defendants with insignificant criminal histories and no connections to drug trafficking or other criminal organizations — to omit details about drug quantities from charging documents so as not to lead to automatically harsh penalties.
Holder on Friday called the new policy “unwise and ill-informed,” saying it ignored consensus between Democrats and Republicans, and data demonstrating that prosecutions of high-level drug defendants had risen under his guidance.
“This absurd reversal is driven by voices who have not only been discredited but until now have been relegated to the fringes of this debate,” he said in a statement.
Supporters of Holder’s policy have argued that quantities of drugs are a weak indicator of how dangerous a person may be.
“Long sentences for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses do not promote public safety, deterrence and rehabilitation,” Holder wrote in his 2013 memo, noting that in fact they exacerbate an expensive, overburdened prison system. The Obama administration, which led a bipartisan push for more lenient and flexible sentencing laws, presided over the first decline in the federal prison population in a generation.
“There’s a long history of these memos saying both that prosecutors should charge the most serious, readily provable offense, but also that prosecutors should exercise some discretion,” said David Alan Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford University who specializes in criminal justice. “There’s tension between those two things.”
Under Sessions, the Justice Department believes critics of mandatory minimum sentences are challenging laws approved by Congress.
Sklansky, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, disagreed.
“Not everybody who falls within the letter of the criminal prohibition is somebody who deserves that kind of criminal punishment,” he said. “It’s not about excusing people or condoning criminal behavior. It’s a question of trying to figure out how much punishment is enough and at what point are you piling on needlessly and at great cost.”
“Decades of experience shows we cannot arrest and incarcerate our way out of America’s drug problem,” said Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney in Utah. “Instead, we must direct resources to treatment and to specifically combating violent crime.”
Sessions contends that violent crimes such as murder can be an outgrowth of drug crime, and has suggested that prosecuting drug crimes more vigorously will reduce a broader range of crime.
“Many violent crimes are driven by drug trafficking and drug trafficking organizations,” Sessions, who was a prosecutor at the height of the 1980s crack epidemic, wrote in a March 8 memo.