January 30, 2012
Whether the federal Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1, applies to defendants who committed their offenses before the Act was passed but were sentenced after the Act’s passage.
Congress pas
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sed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010 because it recognized that the 100:1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine that it had adopted in 1986 was unsupported by science and has had a severe, disproportionate impact on racial minorities. Because the purpose of the Act was “to restore fairness to Federal cocaine sentencing,” the amicus brief submitted by the ACLU and a coalition of other civil rights groups argues that Congress could not have intended for anyone to be sentenced under the old, discredited regime following the Act’s passage.
