Federal Appeals Court Panel Extends Crack Sentencing Retroactivity

In a Friday decision, a three-judge panel of the US 6^th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati held that the provisions of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act that reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses should apply to people convicted even before the law was passed. If upheld, the ruling could reduce the sentences of thousands of inmates, mostly black, who were sentenced under the draconian old laws.

The case was US v. Cornelius and Jarreous Blewitt, in which the Blewitt cousins were convicted in 2005 of federal crack cocaine charges and sentenced to mandatory minimum prison sentences. The Blewitts appealed their sentences, citing the Fair Sentencing Act's impact on crack cocaine sentencing, and seeking retroactive sentencing in line with the act.

Even though the Fair Sentencing Act had reduced the 100:1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine for sentencing purposes to 18:1, "thousands of inmates, most black, languish in prison under the old, discredited ratio because the Fair Sentencing Act was not made explicitly retroactive by Congress," the court noted.

"In this case, we hold that the federal judicial perpetuation of the racially discriminatory mandatory minimum crack sentences for those defendants sentenced under the old crack sentencing law, as the government advocates, would violate the Equal Protection Clause, as incorporated into the Fifth Amendment," the court wrote, noting that the Fifth Amendment forbids federal racial discrimination in the same way as the Fourteenth Amendment forbids state racial discrimination.

The US Supreme Court had already approved sentencing retroactivity for crack offenders who were charged before the Fair Sentencing Act went into effect but sentenced after it in Dorsey v. US, but this decision from the 6^th Circuit dramatically expands the impact of the Fair Sentencing Act's sentencing reductions by applying it to all federal crack cocaine offenders.

[Ed: Whether the ruling will survive the scrutiny of the 6^th Circuit en banc or the US Supreme Court, if it gets that far, remains to be seen.]