AP:
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 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.
Ginsburg’s logic means that a liberal Federal judge presiding over a drug case can now hand out lenient sentences to black crack cocaine defendants, based on the political permission she has now granted to them to make subjective political assessments on the sentencing guidelines and their disparate impact on non-whites.
Justice Samuel Alito, who dissented with Justice Clarence Thomas in both cases, said that after Tuesday’s decisions, “Sentencing disparities will gradually increase.”
Alito and Thomas are right. Disparity will only increase, because of the wildly varying political opinions of judges on the Federal bench. The Federal sentencing guidelines were meant to factor out the opinion differences between liberal and conservative judges.
Thankfully, though, there was some racial fairness in SCOTUS’s decisions today:
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.
I think they are goofy decisions, but at least all nine Justices voted the same way in both cases, and the cases involved a black man dealing a stereotypically “black” drug, and a white man dealing a stereotypically “white” drug. In other words, there was no effective racial favoritism from SCOTUS today.
UPDATE 12/12: A regular reader e-mails me and raises a pertinent point: If courts say that sentences for given crimes could be reduced (retroactively when it comes to Federal crack offenders, as it turns out), based on the fact that the given sentence “unfairly” affects racial minorities, then it’s not a stretch to think that the same will be applied to other crimes, like murder — we could see a situation in the near future where non-death sentences for convicted murderers could be reduced because of the disproportionate ratio of black men in prison for murder.
The U.S. Justice Department estimates that 19,500 Federal prisoners, virtually all black men, will be set free thanks to this court decision. And the areas they are released in are areas where crime will go up, sure as God made apples.