drugcrimedefender

Some Crack Cocaine Relief

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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 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.

. . .

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.

Crack Cocaine Sentencing To Be Lessened?

Sentencing Law and Policy reports hints that the new sentencing guidelines may address the powder v. crack cocaine disparity.

NH Men Face Life in OD Deaths

From the Manchester Union Leader:

BRENTWOOD – A 63-year-old East Kingston man who sold the powerful painkiller Oxycodone to a teenager who later overdosed on the drug was found guilty on a related charge yesterday and may now face a life sentence.

Anthony Damelio, of 20 Cove Road, East Kingston, is the second person in three weeks to be convicted by a Rockingham County jury on the charge of dispensing a controlled drug with a death resulting.

On April 19, Dante Silva, 23, of Newton, was convicted on the same charge for giving 18-year-old Caitlin Brady of Kingston a lethal dose of heroin.

The maximum penalty for the charge is life in prison. Sentencing hearings in both cases have yet to be scheduled.

New New Hampshire Prison Approved

This news should make it easier for inmates from the northeast to stay in touch with families once sentenced.  Current US Marshall's pretrial detainees are located in county jails all over Maine.  I hope they dont just start shipping everyone just accross the state line as this will make face to face communications with clients even more difficult.

From the Manchester Union Leader:

BERLIN – Nearly six years after city officials floated the idea of locating a federal prison here, design and construction contracts were awarded yesterday to firms in New York, according to U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, R-NH.

"This is good news," Berlin City Manager Pat McQueen said. "It has been long anticipated and long awaited."

The contracts were awarded to Bell Constructors and Heery Construction Company, a joint venture out of Rochester, N.Y. More than $230 million has been secured for the project over the past five years.

The Bureau of Prisons has planned a 1,280-bed, medium-security prison on property near the New Hampshire state prison in the northeast corner of the city, near the Milan town line. When completed, it is expected to employ 300 people.

Word of the contracts came nearly a year to the day after Berlin's pulp mill, which fueled the local economy for more than a century, shuttered its doors forever, taking with it some 250 jobs.

"This is far better news," McQueen said.

Crack Cocaine Sentencing Update

Sentencing Law & Policy has some great comments up on new developments in crack cocaine sentencing.

Louis Freeh Against Mandatory minimums

Via Corrections Sentencing:

Sense and courage in one day not once but twice??? If Louis Freeh says what we've been saying here over and over, does that mean we're ready to run the FBI? Try this out: "Louis J. Freeh, the nation's former top cop and a self-described 'law enforcement guy,' is leading an effort in Delaware to repeal state laws that require minimum prison terms for convicted drug offenders. . . . Freeh said he got involved with SURJ based, in part, on his experience as a federal judge. He recalled having to sentence 20-year-old offenders who were drug users -- but not dealers -- to nearly two years in prison. 'And they will come out hardened' by the prison system, Freeh said. . . . 'Drugs are cheaper, purer and more available than ever before, and America's prison population has tripled to more than 2.1 million,' Freeh wrote. In Delaware, the prison and jail population has more than quadrupled in the last 25 years, Freeh wrote. The cost to support the rising prison population has soared to more than $200 million a year. "Still, drug use has not declined and our communities are not safer,' Freeh wrote." And here, Bill Richardson has signed NM's approval of its new med marijuana law, despite displeasure and threats from the usual suspects. Why? "'It's a humane piece of legislation. It does not mean I support legalizing marijuana,' Richardson said. 'It means that we are alleviating suffering, ... and I must tell you, I was overcome by the personal stories of pain and the personal appeals I got.' The governor said he had heard from law enforcement agencies unhappy with the new law, and he acknowledged it might be unpopular with others as well. 'So be it,' he said." Realism creeping in despite ourselves.

Again, this does not imply approval of general drug use. Here's yet another reason why: "Young people who abuse cocaine and amphetamines are at heightened risk for suffering a stroke, a study published Monday confirms. Cocaine, amphetamines, and other stimulants may boost the risk of stroke by raising blood pressure or by triggering spasms in blood vessel walls."

Courts Continue to Uphold Crack Cocaine Disparity

From Sentencing Law and Policy:

In a brief per curiam opinion today in US v. Leatch, No. 06-10526 (5th Cir. Mar. 22, 2007) (available here), the Fifth Circuit follows the misguided herd of other circuits on post-Booker crack sentencing by holding that "a sentencing court may not deviate from the 100:1 crack-powder ratio based solely upon its belief that the policies underpinning that sentencing regime are misguided or unfair."   I have explained at length in many prior posts (see, e.g., here and here) why I view this kind of ruling seems so substantively misguided.

Read the whole post here.

A Crack in Crack Cocaine Sentencing?

Various comentators and news organizations have suggested Congress may be interested in addressing the 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine.

From USA Today

Momentum is building in Congress to ease crack cocaine sentencing guidelines, which the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics say have filled prisons with low-level drug dealers and addicts whose punishments were much worse than their crimes.

Federal prison sentences for possessing or selling crack have far exceeded those for powder cocaine for two decades. House Crime Subcommittee chairman Robert Scott, D-Va., a longtime critic of such sentencing policies, plans to hold hearings on crack sentences this year. In the Senate, Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama is drawing bipartisan support for his proposal to ease crack sentences.

"I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy that crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can't be justified," Sessions says. "People don't want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational."

The mandatory federal sentencing guidelines passed by Congress in 1986 require a judge to impose the same sentence for possession of 5 grams of crack as for 500 grams of powder cocaine: five years in prison.

Congress passed the sentencing laws just after the fatal crack overdose of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias on June 19, 1986, and as crack was emerging in urban areas, says Alfred Blumstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who researches crime. Crack cocaine was associated with violent, open-air drug markets, he says.

BLOGS & COMMENT

• Sentencing Law and Policy Part I, Part II & Part III
• Crime and Consquences
• Arizona Public Defender's Office Open Letter to Congress
• The Sentencing Project Submits Comment on Crack Cocaine to United States Sentencing Commission
• CrimProfBlog

First Circuit continues to to adhere to the crack sentencing disparity, even post-Booker

• US v. Pho
• A federal brief out of Pennsylvannia addressing Pho.