Crack Sentences Can Be Reduced

[Steve]

Shorter crack cocaine jail terms OK'd

Supreme Court also rules similarly in case involving ecstasy

The Associated Press

 

WASHINGTON - The 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 veteran of the 1991 war with Iraq, was acceptable, even though federal sentencing guidelines called for Kimbrough to receive 19 to 22 years.

 

In a separate sentencing case that did not involve crack cocaine, the court also ruled in favor of judicial discretion to impose more lenient sentences than federal guidelines recommend.

 

The challenges to criminal sentences center on a judge's discretion to impose a shorter sentence than is called for in guidelines established by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, at Congress' direction. The guidelines were adopted in the mid-1980s to help produce uniform punishments for similar crimes...

 

This was one of those laws that proved the theory that if you make a knee jerk law to solve a problem you will get a worse, unforseen consequence.

 

When crack hit the inner city in the '80s it was like a typhoon. It changed whole neighborhoods. Mine got hit very hard. Everyone I knew were either on it or serving jail for it. Black politicians demanded something to be done and lobbied for harsher sentences for posession of it. The thinking was the people who were at the top would be in jail for long time.

 

This resulted in hundreds of thousands if not millions of black and latin users and sellers, many of them very young in prisons and led the overcrowding we see nowadays. Most crimes are drug related. Either selling or stealing to get high.

 

The ones at the top of the pyramid weren't getting caught or caught to the same degree the guy on the corner was.

 

Now the same politicians are crying about how the sentencing was unfair, when they were the ones lobbying for it 25 years ago.

 

 

 

[Bangkoktraveler]

Why wasn't the politicians complaing that the drugs their people were taking were of an inconsistent quality?

 

We can not solve the drug problem so why not make it legal?

[Steve]

There is a hypocracy about the whole drug war thing. What is wrong is a matter of opinion. Alcohol was deemed wrong in the 1920s and then it wasn't. Alcohol and tobacco related deaths far, far exceed cocaine related deaths and far, far more people are addicted to alcohol and tobacco than crack but the difference is the government makes money off the first two.

 

When I was a kid there was a thing called 'the numbers'. It was the rackets and the government said it was evil and mob run, etc. Numbers as I knew it as a kid is no more. Not because the government successfully caught all the people running it, they got into the numbers business via the lottery. The pick 3 is the same as the numbers. You picked 3 numbers. How come it was illegal for blacks in Harlem to do it and the Italian mafia to do it but the government can do it?

 

Marijuana is shown as this evil gateway drug. As if alochol and tobacco isn't worse. Its laughable and no one of note will publicly say how hypocritical the government is about it all.