US President Barack Obama announced Thursday afternoon that he had commuted the sentences of eight people convicted of federal drug offenses, six of them serving life sentences, including one for dealing crack cocaine when he was 17 years old.
What connects the eight commutations is that each prisoner was sentenced prior to the passage of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which narrowed the massive disparities between sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Before that, a person convicted of an offense involving possession of crack cocaine would get the same mandatory prison term as someone with 100 times that amount of powder cocaine, even though the two drugs are largely similar in effect and pharmacology. The sentencing differential particularly impacted African Americans, who historically have been disproportionately convicted of federal crack cocaine offenses (despite the fact that more white people used crack).
While the Fair Sentencing Act was a step in the right direction, it did not apply to people sentenced prior to its passage. This put the law at odds with a core international human rights treaty – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the United States is a party. The ICCPR requires that offenders serving time in prison under an outdated law should benefit from reductions in sentence under a new law. But the United States declined to follow this provision when it ratified the treaty.
Yesterday’s commutations address some longstanding injustices. Among those receiving commutations is Clarence Aaron, who at 24 was sentenced to three life terms in federal prison even though his role in the crime was simply to introduce two drug dealers to one another and it was his first criminal offense.
Still, if President Obama is serious about fair sentencing, he needs to go beyond a few commutations. Over half of current federal prisoners, more than 100,000 people, are in for drug offenses; a lot of them are serving harsh mandatory minimum sentences, many for nonviolent offenses. Human Rights Watch has recently documented cases in which federal drug offenders have received mandatory life sentences on the basis of old, minor drug possession offenses.
Bringing drug sentences back into balance will require an act of Congress. Lawmakers could start by passing several bipartisan measures currently being considered in both the Senate and House of Representatives. But Congress should also go further, eliminating mandatory minimums and excessively long sentences for drug offenders, so that the need for these types of commutations is a thing of the past.
