Recently in Government Category

CBS News by way of AP reports:

“The Supreme Court wrestled Tuesday with how to give judges discretion to impose shorter prison terms, including for some crack cocaine crimes, without abandoning the long-standing national goal of similar punishments for similar crimes.

One case involved a crack cocaine dealer who received a 15-year term when the guidelines called for 19 to 22 years in prison.

The law includes what critics have called a 100-to-1 disparity: Trafficking in 5 grams of crack cocaine carries a mandatory five-year prison sentence, but it takes 500 grams of cocaine powder to warrant the same sentence.

That difference has made it a racial issue, reports CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews. Because most crack dealers are black, African Americans tend to think the law was written to put black men away…

Advocates for reducing the disparity point to crime statistics that show crack is more of an urban and minority drug while cocaine powder is used more often by the affluent. They say harsher penalties for crack cocaine unfairly punish blacks.

More than four-fifths of crack cocaine offenders in federal courts last year were black, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. By contrast, just over a quarter of those convicted of powder cocaine crimes last year were black, the commission said.” READ MORE & WATCH VIDEO