Congress gets to work on ‘that crack thing’

It focuses on equalizing penalties between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine.

Washington Post

WASHINGTON — After two decades of criticism over cocaine sentences that disproportionately punish blacks, momentum is building in Congress and in the Obama administration for a legislative fix, representing a fundamental shift in politics and attitude, even among key GOP lawmakers.

For the first time after multiple attempts, a House subcommittee this week approved a bill to equalize criminal penalties for people caught with crack and powder cocaine. The bill would also eliminate five-year mandatory minimum prison terms for offenders convicted of possessing rock cocaine without an intent to sell it.

The subcommittee vote came as a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting to craft a similar proposal, which could be unveiled as early as next week, according to two congressional sources.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., forecast the idea during confirmation hearings this month for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, when he said, “I think we’re going to do that crack thing.”

Senior leaders at the Justice Department already have launched a wide review of sentencing practices, including laws dating to the drug epidemic in the 1980s that penalized crack cocaine offenders at rates 100 times higher than people caught with the same amount of powder cocaine.

“We all know that this egregious difference in punishment is simply wrong,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told the National Association of Black Prosecutors in a speech Wednesday. “The Department of Justice will never back down from its duty to protect our citizens and our neighborhoods from drugs, or from the violence that all too often accompanies the drug trade. But we must discharge this duty in a way that protects our communities as well as the public’s confidence in the justice system.”

In recent weeks, two federal judges, including one in the District, took matters into their own hands and gave crack cocaine defendants the lower sentences for powder cocaine possession.

In testimony to Congress this year, Justice Department criminal division chief Lanny A. Breuer cited statistics reflecting that more than 80 percent of criminals sentenced for crack-related offenses are black. Blacks log only 27 percent of powder cocaine crimes, an issue highlighted for years by members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Critical administration figures have offered support for the initiative, which President Obama and Vice President Biden promoted on the campaign trail.

But the idea has been fought in the past by groups representing prosecutors, police chiefs and narcotics officers. The Bush administration never lent its support to completely eliminating the sentencing disparity.