Pubdate: Sun, 11 Aug 2013
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2013 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Debra J. Saunders
Page: E4

3 REFORMS FOR WAR ON DRUGS

Eric Holder, America's first African American attorney general, and 
his boss Barack Obama, the first black president, haven't been shy 
about pointing out racial disparities in the criminal justice system. 
Racial profiling? It's real, they say. State "stand your ground" 
laws? Obama says they don't work for minorities. Yet both have been 
conspicuously absent when it comes to redressing racial disparities 
in their own home turf, the federal government's ill-conceived war on drugs.

That could change when Holder addresses the American Bar Association 
in San Francisco Monday.

The war on drugs has presented "a lot of unintended consequences," 
Holder recently told National Public Radio, and "we can certainly 
change our enforcement policies." NPR reports that Justice Department 
lawyers have been crafting reform proposals, which Holder might roll 
out at the lawyer confab. It's about time. Tea Party Republican Sens. 
Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah have co-sponsored 
legislation (with Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Patrick Leahy, 
D-Vt.) to reform federal mandatory minimum sentences. Holder told NPR 
that the administration wants to work with legislators. Translation: 
Obama has been waiting for political cover, and now he has it.

Federal mandatory-minimum-sentencing laws were meant to deliver hard 
time for drug kingpins, but too often they have been used to 
incarcerate nonviolent low-level offenders for too long. As U.S. 
District Judge Roger Vinson told the New York Times, the system 
rewards people who know enough to inform on others, while "the small 
fry, the little workers who don't have that information, get the 
mandatory sentences."

Vinson was explaining how federal mandatory minimums required that he 
sentence Floridian Stephanie George to life without parole because 
her dealer boyfriend had stowed half of a kilogram of cocaine in her 
attic, but the boyfriend and his associates were sentenced to less 
than 15 years.

The Drug Policy Alliance, which opposes the drug war, has urged the 
administration to support the Leahy-Paul Safety Valve Act and the 
Durbin-Lee Smarter Sentencing Act as well as a bipartisan House bill 
to allow early supervised release of certain federal prisoners. The 
alliance's Bill Piper believes "Holder considers sentencing reform to 
be a legacy issue."

I hope Piper's right. I am still waiting for Obama to make good on 
his 2008 campaign promise to "immediately" review federal sentencing 
"to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the ineffective 
warehousing of nonviolent drug offenders."

Obama did sign the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 to reduce the 
disparity in sentencing for crack versus powder cocaine. Possession 
of 5 grams of crack cocaine had triggered a five-year mandatory 
minimum sentence, while the trigger for powder cocaine was 500 grams. 
(About 4 out of 5 crack offenders were black, while 27 percent of 
powder cocaine offenders were black, in 2006.)

Because the Fair Sentencing Act was not retroactive, law Professor 
Douglas Berman co-wrote a piece in Slate last month in which he 
called on Obama to use his presidential pardon power to commute the 
sentences of around 5,000 crack offenders over-sentenced under the 
old law. "A stroke of the pen can undo vast racial disparities in 
criminal sentences," the piece argued.

Whoa. Berman's plan risks the release of some truly bad guys. It 
would make much more sense for Obama to name a panel to review old 
cases first. Over the phone, Berman agreed that there were shrewder, 
safer ways for Obama to commute sentences and railed against the 
administration's "inability to think you can do it shrewdly."

To date, the president has commuted only one sentence. He has the 
worst pardon record of any modern president. That's unconscionable, 
when you consider Stephanie George and Clarence Aaron, a nonviolent 
first-time drug offender serving life without parole.

Marijuana isn't an issue of racial justice, but it is an issue of 
individual rights and states' rights. As a candidate in 2008, Obama 
signaled that he was reluctant to sic the awesome power of the 
federal government on medical marijuana in states where voters had 
legalized it.

As president, however, Obama allowed federal prosecutors to go to 
town on medical marijuana distributors. Piper described the Obama 
administration as "definitely more aggressive against medical 
marijuana than the Bush administration, although their rhetoric has 
been better."

That rhetoric, Piper believes, resulted in Colorado and Washington 
voters approving measures to legalize the recreational use of 
marijuana last year. In December, Holder said the Department of 
Justice would announce a policy on the new laws "relatively soon." 
Hasn't happened yet.

Maybe marijuana is like same-sex marriage, and Team Obama is asking: 
Is it safe to evolve positions now?

Here's the question: Are Obama and Holder:

A: Equivocators, who can act now because with no re-election at 
stake, there's no downside?

Or B: Cold partisans who care about race and justice only as 
ideological wedges?

So far the answer is B.
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