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Tag: sentencing reform
Harsh Drug Sentences Take Their Toll On Black Lives

Harsh Drug Sentences Take Their Toll On Black Lives

On a Sunday morning in late July, in a small town in southwest Alabama, Barbara Moore Knight gave her fellow church members news that brought spontaneous applause and murmurs of “Amen!” She told them that her son, James LaRon Knight, was among the drug felons whose sentences had been commuted by President Barack Obama the week before.

In 2004, Knight was convicted of conspiracy to sell cocaine. Although the crime was nonviolent, he was sentenced to more than 24 years in a federal prison. The sentence was a travesty, an unduly harsh punishment for a family man never accused of running a substantial criminal enterprise.

Knight, 48, is among countless black Americans ruined by the long, costly and punitive effort to stamp out recreational use of illegal drugs. The owner of a barbershop in suburban Atlanta, he was convicted on the testimony of acquaintances who found themselves caught in the spiderweb of the criminal justice system and offered him up as a way to appease authorities. There was no direct evidence that Knight possessed or sold banned substances.

Recognizing the havoc wreaked by the so-called war on drugs, especially in black America, Obama has worked to ameliorate its effects. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the Clemency Project, which aims to reduce the disproportionately long federal sentences handed out to hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders over the past decade or so. The president has reduced or ended the prison sentences of more than 560 federal prisoners so far, most of them convicted of nonviolent drug-related crimes.

Obama also helped persuade Congress to reduce the inequities in federal drug-sentencing policies, which had punished those convicted of handling crack cocaine more harshly than those sentenced for powdered cocaine. (Many states retain similar inequitable statutes.) The old law gave a person convicted of possessing 5 grams of crack, which was more prevalent in poor black neighborhoods, a mandatory five-year prison sentence. But those who possessed powdered cocaine, used mostly by more affluent whites, had to have 100 times as much to draw the same sentence. The new federal law substantially narrows the disparity.

Given increasing awareness of the costs of the war on drugs and of the inequities that still haunt the criminal justice system, you’d think that the Clemency Project would have been greeted with universal support. The burden of mass incarceration falls heavily on the shoulders of black Americans, who are less likely than whites to use illegal drugs, according to research, but more likely to go to prison for drug crimes anyway.

Still, there are many prosecutors and conservative politicians who have denounced Obama’s push against mass incarceration. U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., an early supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential bid, rushed to condemn Obama’s most recent commutations, claiming the president “continues to abuse executive power in an unprecedented, reckless manner.”

So the prejudices — the preconceived notions, the stereotypes, the outright racism — continue. The tragic heroin epidemic has prompted an outpouring of sympathy and calls for a less punitive approach to illegal drugs, but heroin users are overwhelmingly white. That compassion has not been extended to black Americans, who are still regarded as more drug-addled, more violent, more dangerous and more deserving of lengthy prison terms.

(Tellingly, those prejudices extend beyond the criminal justice system and into the medical establishment. According to research, doctors are less likely to prescribe heavy-duty painkillers, such as oxycodone, to black patients, even when their pain is severe. “Our data pretty clearly say it’s a race issue,” Raymond Tait, a pain researcher at Saint Louis University in Missouri, told The New York Times.)

Barbara Moore Knight describes herself as “still on cloud nine” after the news of her son’s early release. “I really do thank God for working through President Obama,” she said.

Her obvious joy notwithstanding, her family has paid dearly for America’s obsession with treating nonviolent drug crimes as existential threats to the republic. Her son’s marriage fell apart after his incarceration; he missed crucial years with his sons, who are now 27 and 14. Obama’s clemency cannot restore those pieces of a man’s life.

(Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: Inmates walk in San Quentin state prison in San Quentin, California, June 8, 2012.     REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Pure Lunacy To Jail This Man For 20 Years

Pure Lunacy To Jail This Man For 20 Years

The travesty imprisonment of Orville “Lee” Wollard will continue, with the blessing of Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Last week, Scott cast the decisive vote to keep Wollard locked up for firing a warning shot after being attacked in his home by his daughter’s boyfriend. Police said the boyfriend ripped the surgical stitches from Wollard’s abdomen.

The 60-year-old first-time offender has already served about seven years of a mandatory 20-year term. A Polk County jury had convicted him of shooting into a dwelling and aggravated assault with a firearm.

A charge of child abuse was included because the boyfriend of Wollard’s daughter was 17 at the time of the incident, in 2008.

Curiously, the same prosecutor who’d originally offered Wollard a deal of five years’ probation (with no prison time) told the state clemency board on Wednesday that Wollard should stay behind bars after all this time.

State Attorney Jerry Hill offered no good explanation for his 180-degree pivot, nor did Scott bother to ask how Wollard could suddenly be a menace to society when he was deemed suitable for probation before his trial.

Hill asked clemency officials to keep Wollard in prison because he has “a history of bad decisions” that includes drug use. A Department of Corrections official told Times/Herald reporter Steve Bousquet that Wollard has a perfect disciplinary record at the Apalachee Correctional Institution, where he’s an inmate.

Wollard, who has a master’s degree, was a former human-resources specialist at SeaWorld in Orlando. His case has become part of a national (and bipartisan) movement to reform minimum-mandatory sentencing guidelines and give judges more leeway.

Those rigid laws have worsened prison overcrowding, at enormous cost to taxpayers. In Washington, a coalition of Democratic and Republican senators has announced a plan to cut mandatory prison terms for nonviolent offenders in the federal system.

Donald Jacobsen, the Florida circuit judge who handed the 20-year hitch to Wollard, conceded at the time that, “If it wasn’t for the minimum-mandatory aspect of this, I would use my discretion and impose some separate sentence, having taken into consideration the circumstances of the event.”

Jacobsen had no choice then but to follow the law.

Lee Wollard stood “stunned.”

He’d rejected the prosecutor’s offer of probation because he didn’t want a criminal record, and believed he’d done nothing wrong. He gambled on a trial, and lost big-time.

Ironically, state legislators last year cited Wollard’s case among others when they rewrote and expanded the controversial “stand your ground” statutes. No longer can a person be arrested for firing a warning shot if he or she feels threatened by use of force. Unfortunately for Wollard, that major change in the law wasn’t retroactive.

Scott, who signed the reform legislation, had a chance to do the right thing and stand up for Wollard. Instead, he sided with the staff of the clemency board and Wollard’s two-faced prosecutor, Hill.

Hill showed to Scott and other Cabinet members on the panel an enlarged photograph of the bullet hole inside Wollard’s house. He argued that the altercation was almost over when Wollard shot off the revolver close to his daughter’s boyfriend.

“There was no reason to fire that shot,” Hill said.

Worst-case scenario: Wollard made a reckless decision trying to scare off a teenager who’d just clawed Wollard’s stitches.

And for that — shooting a slug into a wall — a man who’s never been convicted of any other crime should rot in a cell for 20 years? It’s pure lunacy, and an abominable perversion of the justice system.

There are armed robbers, rapists, even killers who will do less prison time than Lee Wollard.

If the clemency board is hiding some deep, dark information about him, all of it should be made public. But if the panel was swayed by the melodramatic stagecraft of the prosecutor, Wollard ought to be freed.

Rep. Neil Combee, a Polk City Republican, is introducing a bill to change minimum-mandatory sentences in cases like Wollard’s. Combee, who also sponsored last year’s reform bill, cannot fathom how a person who’d been offered probation is now — after seven passive years of incarceration — deserving of 13 more.

Said Combee: “It doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to me, or anybody else.”

Including Wollard’s wife, Sandy, who was in tears when she left the Capitol. “I’m shocked,” she told reporters.

Her husband isn’t eligible for release until July 13, 2028, the same month as his 73rd birthday.

Maybe then they’ll put a real criminal in that cell.

(Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132.)

Photo: Ben (via Flickr)

In Test For Biden, Frustrated Cops Line Up Against Prison Reform

In Test For Biden, Frustrated Cops Line Up Against Prison Reform

By Julia Edwards

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s push for sentencing reforms that would decrease the number of Americans imprisoned – a key focus of his remaining time in office – has won support from an unlikely coalition of liberals and conservatives that includes civil rights groups, tea party Republicans and Koch Industries.

But the effort is running into opposition from a crucial constituency: the law-and-order lobby that represents American police.

Law enforcement groups have stepped up their efforts against proposals circulating in Congress to roll back tough mandatory sentences for drug crimes and focus more resources on reducing recidivism and alternatives to incarceration.

The opposition represents a personal and political challenge to Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime ally of law enforcement, who has been tasked by the White House with winning over skeptical cops even as he weighs whether to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“Law enforcement will always be the bigfoot in the conversation,” said Jesslyn McCurdy, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, which supports sentencing reform. “If they are not on board with any deal, it would be difficult to get it through.”

While Obama has made the public case for criminal justice reform himself, including a first-of-its-kind visit to a federal prison outside Oklahoma City in July, he has turned to Biden and Justice Department officials to make the case to police groups, people involved in those closed-door meetings say.

A former public defender, Biden has been a long-time advocate for police funding. In 1994, he was the Senate sponsor of a landmark crime bill signed by President Bill Clinton that put more cops on the street, imposed tougher sentences and set aside nearly $10 billion for prisons and new police hires.

At a time when relations between the Obama White House and police have been strained by a series of deadly altercations between officers and unarmed black men, including the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Biden has been a voice of solidarity with the beat cop.

In an essay published in April, and then in a breakfast meeting at the White House with police representatives in May, Biden has made the case for increased federal funding for policing as part of a more sweeping prison reform effort.

But, in what amounts to a rebuff of Biden’s outreach, the National Sheriffs’ Association, the oldest U.S. law enforcement lobby, has come out against any move to lower mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders.

Biden continues to express optimism. “The Vice President has been asked to help lead reform efforts and use his unique standing with the law enforcement community to find consensus on a path forward,” his office said in a statement.

Police advocates say the White House’s push to reduce the prison population would risk a spike in drug-related crime and strain many local departments at a time when they face increased scrutiny, simmering tensions with the communities they serve and reduced federal funding.

State and local police departments are funded by local taxes, but the amount of federal funding to support hiring has plunged since the late 1990s.

In 1998, the Justice Department sent $1.4 billion to police through a grant program known as COPS. By 2014 that had dropped to $127 million, prompting hiring freezes or layoffs in departments across the United States in recent years.

In private meetings with police groups, the Justice Department has promised to back legislation that would allocate at least some of any savings from prison reform to policing, two officials said.

But so far, the bipartisan Senate bill the White House is strongly supporting, the Smarter Sentencing Act, makes no guarantees of funding for police.

A bill recently introduced in the House, the SAFE Justice Act, would specifically allocate funding for things such as body armor and law enforcement pensions. But the White House is still considering whether it will support that bill, introduced by Representatives James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, and Robert Scott, a Virginia Democrat.

‘AS SMOOTH AS SANDPAPER’

It is not clear, however, whether even a bill that tied prison reforms to increased police funding would win law enforcement support.

Some groups, including the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, oppose lowering sentences on principle. Others, such as the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police organization, has expressed skepticism about sentencing reform, but has said it would be willing to consider changes that redirected savings from any reform to state and local law enforcement agencies if the money was approved by Congress.

“The White House and Justice Departments can hold out a carrot to law enforcement saying, ‘We can save all this money and give it out in state and local grants.’ But no president or attorney general can make that promise. It’s up to Congress,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police.

A breakfast meeting with Biden and law enforcement groups at the White House in May went “as smooth as sandpaper,” said Jonathan Adler, national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

In the meeting, Biden said he would do everything he could to bring more resources to police but also made the case that it was time to reexamine the U.S. incarceration rate, the highest in the world, participants said.

Adler said Biden’s support for reduced sentences for prisoners serving time for drug crimes had cost him support. “The White House is not really assessing the wider damage these people cause,” said Adler, whose group was one of at least six police groups invited to meetings at the White House.

Conservative proponents of reform, including Charles and David Koch, the billionaire backers of conservative causes, point to the more than $80 billion the United States spends on prisons annually as unsustainable. Among Republican presidential candidates, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have both urged easing mandatory minimum sentences.

Since the early 1970s, the number of Americans in prisons has increased seven-fold. More than 2.2 million people, including a disproportionate numbers of blacks and Hispanics are serving time in U.S. jails and prisons.

Some law enforcement groups have expressed support for sentencing reform, including the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the American Correctional Association, which represents workers in the prison system.

(Reporting by Julia Edwards; Editing by Kevin Krolicki and Sue Horton)

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden speaks prior to the kickoff of the Allegheny County Labor Day Parade in Pittsburgh, PA September 7, 2015. REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk   

A Nation Divided, With Liberty And Justice For Some

A Nation Divided, With Liberty And Justice For Some

It swallowed people up.

That’s what it really did, if you want to know the truth. It swallowed them up whole, swallowed them up by the millions.

In the process, it hollowed out communities, broke families, stranded hope. Politicians brayed that they were being “tough on crime” — as if anyone is really in favor of crime — as they imposed ever longer and more inflexible sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. But the “War on Drugs” didn’t hurt drugs at all: Usage rose by 2,800 percent — that’s not a typo — in the 40 years after it began in 1971. The “War” also made America the biggest jailer on Earth and drained a trillion dollars — still not a typo — from the Treasury.

Faced with that stunning record of costly failure, a growing coalition of observers has been demanding the obvious remedy. End the War. The Obama administration has been unwilling to go quite that far, but apparently, it is about to do the next best thing: Declare a ceasefire and send the prisoners home.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that the government is embarking upon an aggressive campaign to extend clemency to drug offenders. Those whose crimes were nonviolent, who have no ties to gangs or large drug rings and who have behaved themselves while incarcerated will be invited to apply for executive lenience to cut their sentences short.

Nobody knows yet how many men and women that will be. Easily thousands.

Combined with last year’s announcement that the government would no longer seek harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, this may prove the most transformative legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency, excluding the Affordable Care Act. It is a long overdue reform.

But it is not enough.

As journalist Matt Taibbi observes in his new book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, Holder’s Justice Department has declined, essentially as a matter of policy, to prosecute the bankers who committed fraud, laundered money for drug cartels and terrorists, stole billions from their own banks, left taxpayers holding the bag, and also — not incidentally — nearly wrecked the U.S. economy. But let some nobody get caught with a joint in his pocket during a stop-and-frisk and the full weight of American justice falls on him like a safe from a 10th-story window.

For instance, a man named Scott Walker is 15 years into a sentence of life without parole on his first felony conviction for selling drugs. Meantime, thug bankers in gangs with names like Lehman Brothers and HSBC commit greater crimes, yet do zero time.

We have, Taibbi argues, evolved a two-track system under which crimes committed while wearing suit and tie — or pumps — are no longer considered jailable offenses. Taibbi said recently on The Daily Show that prosecutors have actually told him they no longer go after white-collar criminals because such people are not considered “appropriate for jail.”

Who is “appropriate”? Do you even have to ask?

Black people. Brown people. Poor people of whatever hue.

Thousands of whom are apparently coming home now. One hopes there will be a mobilization — government agencies, families, churches, civic groups — to help them assimilate into life on the outside. But one also hopes we the people demand reform of the hypocritical system that put them inside to begin with.

These men and women are being freed from insane sentences that should never have been imposed, much less served. Contrary to the pledge we learned in school, it turns out we are actually one nation divided, with liberty and justice for some.

So yes, it is good to see the attorney general dismantle the War on Drugs. But while he’s at it, let him dismantle the War on Fairness, too.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

AFP Photo/Al Seib