CRACK SENTENCES BEING CHALLENGED AFTER U.S. SUPREME COURT RULING
CALIFORNIA CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYER NEWS:
By Richard B. Schmitt and David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
December 30, 2007
WASHINGTON -- In the spring of 1986, lawmakers had become alarmed by reports of urban crime waves linked to crack, then a new and highly addictive form of cocaine. News reports were full of images of writhing "crack babies" deeply addicted to the drug through their mothers, doomed to "a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority," as one columnist observed.
The sudden death that June of basketball star Len Bias galvanized Washington into passing extraordinarily strict drug laws. Selling as little as 5 grams of crack would bring a mandatory five-year federal prison term, with no possibility of parole.
Now those laws are being questioned, and in some cases relaxed, in the face of evidence that some predictions about the ravages of crack were overblown -- and that the harsh penalties were ineffective.
This month, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to reduce the prison terms of as many as 19,500 federal inmates convicted of crack-related crimes. The decision, which came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court gave federal judges discretion to deviate from strict drug sentencing guidelines, marked a milestone in the two-decade debate over the drug.
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