Mandatory drug sentences targeted
A Senate committee approves a bipartisan bill that would cut lengthy jail terms for many offenders.
WASHINGTON — Most mandatory drug sentences would be cut in half under a bipartisan bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, another victory in the campaign to roll back decades-old laws that require lengthy jail terms for drug offenders and, according to critics, fall heaviest on minorities.
The committee voted 13 to 5 to change most mandatory minimum jail terms from five, 10 or 20 years to two, five or 10 years, and to make retroactive a 2010 law that reduced the sentences for possession of crack cocaine compared with those for powder cocaine. Mandatory minimum terms are applied in about 15,000 drug sentences a year.
“Today’s vote is a major step in what could be a historic shift in the decadeslong war on drugs,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington nonprofit.
The most notable change in the political equation was the support of some prominent Republicans, notably Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, making it highly likely that the bill will clear the full Senate.
The Republican shift appears to be focused on libertarians, some tea party conservatives worried about the high costs of incarceration, and members of the Christian right. But the committee’s top Republican, Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, warned sharply against the changes.
“Heroin addiction is spreading in areas that have never seen the problem before,” Grassley said. “Given the real world that we live in, why should we vote to cut mandatory minimum sentences? We will be sending messages to judges to give far lower sentences.”
Grassley said Republicans would not filibuster the measure on the Senate floor, virtually assuring passage. Mandatory minimum legislation is also pending in the House with bipartisan support, but the positions of the key players there — Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) — were not clear Thursday.
Federal judges have been complaining for years about having their hands tied in drug cases and being forced to sentence people they regard as minor offenders to lengthy prison terms, sometimes effectively for life.
The bill would also provide a path to freedom for an estimated 7,000 imprisoned crack users or dealers sentenced before the Fair Sen- tencing Act was approved nearly four years ago. That law corrected huge term disparities between possession of crack cocaine, predominantly used by African Americans, and similar amounts of powder cocaine.
Though the bill was slightly watered down in committee to attract Republican votes, it is a key feature of Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.’s campaign to increase fairness in sentencing and reduce prison populations.
Holder and Deputy Atty. Gen. James Cole have recently been encouraging private lawyers to represent prisoners they believe to be unfairly languishing in jail in a large-scale effort to apply for commutations of their sentences from President Obama.
“While the United States comprises only 5% of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners,” Cole told the New York State Bar Assn. on Thursday, appealing for help from its members. “And while the entire U.S. population has increased by about one-third over the last 30 years, the federal prison population has increased at a staggering rate of 800% — currently totaling nearly 216,000 inmates.”
In December, Obama commuted the sentences of just eight of the estimated 7,000 prisoners still in jail because of the crack cocaine disparity.