Drug Sentencing Frenzy
Drug Sentencing Frenzy Two months after his eighteenth birthday, Edward Clary visited friends in California. While he was there, one of them persuaded him to take some drugs back home to St. Louis....
...The presumption of innocence is now a legal myth," Cahill said...
...People may believe that they are not motivated by discriminatory attitudes, he argued, but they have internalized their fear of young black men, reinforced by a media that has helped create a national image of the young black male as a criminal...
...If young white males were being incarcerated at the same rate as young black males, the statute would have been amended long ago...
...When considering the differences between crack and powder cocaine, Congress heard the testimony of drug-abuse experts and police officers...
...In his ruling, he discussed the history of crime in the United States...
...Disparate impact, said Judge John Gibson, is not enough to invalidate the statute...
...This crime scare, according to the judge, led to the unfair sentencing ratio...
...Still, some courts have questioned the legitimacy of the sentencing guidelines...
...These defendants claim the law is arbitrary and irrational because it assigns such disproportionate penalties to two forms of the same substance...
...Cahill blames the media for making this fear worse, with its lurid reports of the most horrifying violence...
...The 100-to-one ratio, coupled with mandatory minimum sentencing provided by federal statute, has created a situation that reeks with inhumanity and injustice," Cahill said...
...Furthermore, the ratio was approved, Cahill said, because the nation and Congress were gripped with what he calls "unconscious racism...
...Now approaching his twenty-second birthday, Clary has spent forty months in jail...
...Fear, he said, has led to a lynch-mob mentality and a desire to control crime at any cost, and Congress has become frenzied in its attempts to deal with crime...
...He's still a nice kid, even after all this time in jail," says Smith...
...He also heard Clary's motion challenging the sentencing statute and claiming that the ratio has a disproportionate impact on blacks...
...Clary grew up in a troubled home, raised by aunts and other family members who took the place of his absent parents...
...On September 12, 1994, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Cahill's decision...
...Federal District Judge Clyde Cahill of Missouri heard Clary's plea of guilty to possession with intent to distribute almost sixty-eight grams of cocaine base...
...Clary didn't even make it past the St...
...According to Clary's lawyer, assistant federal public defender Andrea Smith, Clary is "a nice kid who didn't know what he was doing...
...Judge Cahill held the ratio invalid and sentenced Clary to four years in prison...
...With his decision, he hoped to end what he viewed as a dual system of punishment for drug crimes, one for whites and another for blacks...
...Clary and others also argue that the law discriminates against African-Americans, since the majority of those charged with crimes involving crack are black (92.6 percent of those convicted in 1992 for violations involving crack were black, 4.7 percent were white), whereas powder cocaine users are predominantly white...
...Jennifer Elden (Jennifer Elden lives in Olympia, Washington and writes frequently on legal issues...
...As it happened, Edward Clary's case came before one such court...
...Cahill found that the sentencing ratio deprives blacks of equal protection under the law...
...Clary, like defendants in other cases, has challenged the constitutionality of the 100-to-l ratio...
...Identified as someone who looked like a drug courier, he was arrested upon arrival and charged with possessing crack...
...The 100-to-l ratio stands unchanged, and unless the Supreme Court makes his case a landmark, Clary could face a decade in jail...
...Clary was convicted and sentenced under federal guidelines that punish crack offenses 100 times more severely than those involving powder cocaine: a crime involving one gram of crack is penalized the same as a crime involving 100 grams of powder cocaine...
...Louis airport...
...He was so inexperienced that the crack he bought was only about 20 percent pure, and so adulterated it melted in the evidence room...
...Federal courts, however, have consistently rejected the argument that the 100-to-l ratio violates the equal-protection clause of the Constitution...
...Congress, according to these judges, believed that crack was more dangerous to society because of its potency, its afford-ability, its highly addictive nature, and its increasing prevalence...
...Clary's lawyer, Andrea Smith, recently applied to the Supreme Court to hear Clary's case...
...For now, Clary is on supervised release, pending a final determination of his sentence...
...I think he's learned his lesson...
...Clary had never attempted to deal drugs before, and he had no criminal record...
...Several judges have upheld the ratio, finding that Congress had a rational basis for imposing more severe penalties for crack than for powder cocaine, and that there was no evidence of a discriminatory purpose in passing the guidelines...
...He dropped out of high school and had no skills, and he got caught doing something stupid...
Vol. 59 • April 1995 • No. 4
