By Carol Rose, Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts at 4:16pm
The mandatory-sentencing bill that Gov. Patrick said today he will sign should have been better, but could have been worse. The ACLU of Massachusetts opposed this bill because it takes our justice system in the wrong direction, expanding unjust, wasteful mandatory sentencing and depriving judges of the ability to depart from required mandatory maximum sentences for so-called 'habitual offenders'.
By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 3:28pm
The Supreme Court ruled today that the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA), which reduced the disparity in federal sentencing between crack and powder cocaine, applies to people whose offenses pre-date the law but who were sentenced after its passage. Read the opinion here.
The FSA was passed to correct the problems with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created an unfair sentencing scheme that unequally punished comparable offenses involving crack and powder cocaine — two forms of the same drug – and resulted in racially biased sentencing. To remedy the fact that the 100:1 ratio was without penological or scientific justification, and that it resulted in black defendants suffering significantly harsher penalties than white defendants, Congress passed the FSA and reduced the ratio from 100:1 to 18:1. As we’ve written before, the new ratio is a step in the right direction, although the only truly fair and empirically sound ratio would be 1:1.
