Language

Reporter's Notebook: Christopher Fee

Federal crack cocaine law may change after recent recommendation and ruling

Posted by Christopher Fee - December 18, 2007 at 7:23 pm
The Drug Policy Alliance reported this past week that the U.S. Sentencing Commission in an unanimous vote recommended changes in the disparity between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine sentences; crack cocaine carries a sentence up to a hundred times greater than the same quantity of powered cocaine under current federal law. Also,  the U.S. Supreme Court, later in the week, ruled that federal judges may now sentence individuals below the mandatory minimum sentence in crack cocaine cases, though it will take an act of the U.S. Legislative branch to eliminate the law which has been in place for over 20 years. So, for the time being crack offenders will be at the mercy of judges in federal cases until Congress acts. So far, hearings are scheduled in the Senate for early 2008, but no hearings have been set for the House of Representatives on the issue.

Read more: Drug Policy Alliance

About Christopher Fee

Latest Notebook Entries

more

Add comment

Our Policy on Comment Submissions: Co-publishers of Narco News (which includes The Narcosphere and The Field) may post comments without moderation. All co-publishers comment under their real name, have contributed resources or volunteer labor to this project, have filled out this application and agreed to some simple guidelines about commenting.

Narco News has recently opened its comments section for submissions to moderated comments (that’s this box, here) by everybody else. More than 95 percent of all submitted comments are typically approved, because they are on-topic, coherent, don’t spread false claims or rumors, don’t gratuitously insult other commenters, and don’t engage in commerce, spam or otherwise hijack the thread. Narco News reserves the right to reject any comment for any reason, so, especially if you choose to comment anonymously, the burden is on you to make your comment interesting and relevant. That said, as you can see, hundreds of comments are approved each week here. Good luck in your comment submission!

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

User login

Reporters' Notebooks