If you live deep underground in an American cave without newspapers, radio, Internet or cable, then the Crack/Powder Sentencing Disparity may be new to you.If you live on the surface of the USA, then it's real old news.
This Supreme Court decision, of course, is hot off the presses, and it's wonderfully Good News.
White Powder and Crack are two street drug forms of the identical chemical, cocaine. To a biochemist, they're indistinguishable.
To a racist, they're very different. Overwhelmingly, whites in affluent suburbs and neighborhoods with a penchant for illegal cocaine buy and snort White Powder. Blacks in the inner-city ghetto who do cocaine buy it as small solid rocks of Crack and smoke it in a glass pipe.
It's a bang-for-the-buck marketing thing. Affluent whites aren't looking for bargains when they want a bag of coke for the Christmas party or the bachelor stag party. White Powder cocaine is a naughty luxury, and provided it's of good purity, the more money you pay, the naughtier the thrill is.
A rock of crack is targeted for addicts with very little cash in their pockets. It's the affordable bargain form of cocaine that provides a cheap and intense rush.
Both forms are addictive, and the medical downsides are the same. Long-term use of cocaine, or an overdose, is a fast track shortcut to a heart attack.
Before I begin sounding like a Prohibitionist, cocaine and its laboratory derivatives -- like the derivatives of the opium poppy -- have extremely important and beneficial medical properties, primarily in anesthesia. A medical world without cocaine would be as ghastly and ferociously painful as amputations and surgery were before the introduction of morphia. The pioneer of cocaine as local anesthetic was a founding surgeon at Johns Hopkins hospital and medical school in Baltimore -- and a lifelong cocaine addict.
Doctrinaires regularly maintain that there exists no substance that can authentically claim to have aphrodisiac properties, but cocaine is certainly widely perceived as an aphrodisiac -- an excellent investment to guide an evening toward sex, and to turn the sex exciting and memorable. Fifty million cocaine buyers could be wrong -- but probably aren't.
Doctrinaires have never even tried to claim that cocaine doesn't provide powerful euphoria and pleasurable stimulation. There's a reason why the Andean coca growing regions grow so much of it, process so much of the harvested coca leafs into cocaine powder/crystals, and smuggle tons of it to North America and Europe. People around the world are willing to pay lots of money, and to ignore any law, and to risk arrest and prison for happiness and pleasure. Arguably, you can't get True Happiness from any drug. But millions of people regularly spend millions of dollars and are more than satisfied to settle for the False Happiness cocaine provides.
Cocaine is very erosive of Good Judgment and Common Sense, but it goes very well with intellectual clarity and alertness. People with a need or desire to stay awake and alert for abnormal periods of time -- exam cramming, for example, or military combat -- regularly turn to cocaine, and I suspect marathon computer coders have turned to it, too (although Jolt Cola's sugar jolt and maximum allowable caffeine is the coder's most famous legal friend). Sherlock Holmes injected a 7 percent solution of cocaine when London's criminal reality failed to provide him with stimulation.
But whether a cocaine molecule goes down a black person's throat or through a white person's mucus membrane, it's the same stuff. But the federal mandatory minimum crack/powder disparity was the Perfect Sieve for going light on white cocaine users and throwing the book at black cocaine users. It was the perfect Jim Crow Nouveau.
For more than a decade, scores of senior federal judges, who can use their tenure to refuse to preside over cases, have refused to hear federal drug cases and be forced to be puppets and sign their names to the racist mandatory minimum sentences.
Notice that one of the US Supreme Court justices who voted to keep the crack/powder disparity is a black man. It might not be correct to say that Clarence Thomas hates black people, but he hates crack users 100 times more than he hates powder users -- and 85 percent of convicted crack users are black.
This is a good decision, and it's better because it's not a 4/5 squeaker. 7-2 means the Court acknowledged and really hated the racist core, origins and damage of the crack/powder disparity.
It's by no means the turnaround point of the disastrous and racist War on Drugs.
But a central aspect of The Racist Machine -- mandatory minimum drug sentences which federal sentencing judges were forbidden from deviating from -- is gone now, and the trend to restore sentencing discretion to judges will doubtless continue. And state courts will take notice, and decide to do the same.
The War On Drugs has nothing to do with drugs. Congress and state legislatures could care less whether American adults or American children do less drugs. To an elected lawmaker, the War On Drugs is cheap, savage, racist vote candy to get re-elected forever by tossing blacks and Hispanics in prison -- a very popular kind of law with white voters.
The War On Drugs -- an entirely bipartisan racist achievement -- is all about disenfranchising and mass-imprisoning blacks and Hispanics, and destroying their communities.
Maybe it will slow down a little from this decision on. Maybe the Land of the Free will start examining its Gulagocracy, the world's largest prison system, and asking if there's a more decent way, a more ethical way, a less racist way -- a smarter way -- to deal with drugs.
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The Associated Press (US newswire)
Monday 10 December 2007
US Supreme Court:
Judges Can Reduce
Crack Sentences
by Mark Sherman
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States Supreme Court on Monday said judges may impose shorter prison terms for crack cocaine crimes, enhancing judicial discretion to reduce the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine powder.
By a 7-2 vote, the court said that a 15-year sentence given to Derrick Kimbrough, a black veteran of the 1991 war with Iraq, was acceptable, even though federal sentencing guidelines called for Kimbrough to receive 19 to 22 years.
"In making that determination, the judge may consider the disparity between the guidelines' treatment of crack and powder cocaine offenses," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her majority opinion.
The decision was announced ahead of a vote scheduled for Tuesday by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets the guidelines, that could cut prison time for up to an estimated 19,500 federal inmates convicted of crack crimes.
The Sentencing Commission recently changed the guidelines to reduce the disparity in prison time for the two crimes. New guidelines took effect Nov. 1 after Congress took no action to overturn the change. Tuesday's vote is whether to apply the guidelines retroactively.
In a separate sentencing case that did not involve crack cocaine, the court also said judges have discretion to impose more lenient sentences than federal guidelines recommend.
The cases are the result of a decision three years ago in which the justices ruled that judges need not strictly follow the sentencing guidelines. Instead, appellate courts would review sentences for reasonableness, although the court has since struggled to define what it meant by that term.
The guidelines were established by the Sentencing Commission, at Congress' direction, in the mid-1980s to help produce uniform punishments for similar crimes.
Justice Samuel Alito, who dissented with Justice Clarence Thomas in both cases, said that after Tuesday's decisions, "Sentencing disparities will gradually increase."
Kimbrough's case did not present the justices with the ultimate question of the fairness of the disparity in crack and powder cocaine sentences. Congress wrote the harsher treatment for crack into a law that sets a mandatory minimum five-year prison sentence for trafficking in 5 grams of crack cocaine or 100 times as much cocaine powder. The law also sets maximum terms.
Seventy percent of crack defendants are given the mandatory prison terms.
Kimbrough is among the remaining 30 percent who, under the guidelines, get even more time in prison because they are convicted of trafficking in more than the amount of crack that triggers the minimum sentences.
"A reviewing court could not rationally conclude that it was an abuse of discretion" to cut four years off the guidelines-recommended sentence for Kimbrough, Ginsburg said.
In the other case, the court, also by a 7-2 vote, upheld a sentence of probation for Brian Gall for his role in a conspiracy to sell 10,000 pills of ecstasy. U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt of Des Moines, Iowa, determined that Gall had voluntarily quit selling drugs several years before he was implicated, stopped drinking, graduated from college and built a successful business. The guidelines said Gall should have been sent to prison for 30 to 37 months.
"The sentence imposed by the experienced district judge in this case was reasonable," Justice John Paul Stevens said in his majority opinion.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, David Souter, Ginsburg and Stevens formed the majority in both cases.
The cases are Kimbrough v. U.S., 06-6330, and Gall v. U.S., 06-7949.
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