American Civil Liberties Union

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would like to thank the United States Sentencing Commission for this opportunity to help the Commission formulate recommendations to Congress regarding changes in federal sentencing law. Today, we commend the Commission for its past extensive efforts calling on Congress to amend statutes creating the unjust disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing. We wholeheartedly agree with this body’s 2004 conclusion that “[r]evising the crack cocaine thresholds” would do more to reduce the sentencing gap “than any other single policy change, and it would dramatically improve the fairness of the federal sentencing system.”1 Moreover, we commend the Commission for the 2007 retroactive amendments making the Guidelines more consistent with statutory mandatory minimums, and creating eligibility for approximately 19,500 prisoners to be properly re-sentenced in accordance with the law. We hope that this body will continue to champion and recommend change—specifically, we urge the Commission to remind Congress of the continued, urgent need to amend a sentencing scheme which unjustifiably metes out disparately harsh punishments to African Americans in violation of basic fairness.