At a time of problematic and often ugly partisanship inside the Beltway, I have continued to believe and hope that a number of federal sentencing reforms could and should still be able to secure significant bipartisan support. This belief was reinforced yesterday when the House Judiciary Committee voted 36 to 5 to advance the Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law (EQUAL) Act. Excitingly, not only does this bill reduce crack statutory sentences to the level of powder cocaine offenses, it also provides for all previously convicted crack offenders to obtain a resentencing. (Recall that neither the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 nor the FIRST STEP Act of 2018 included full retroactivity for the sentencing reductions in those reform bills.)
I want to believe that the overwhelming vote in support of the EQUAL Act in the House Judiciary Committee means that a vote a passage by the full House will be coming soon. I also want to believe that the bill, which also has bipartisan Senate support, could move efficiently through the upper chamber and become law this year. But, because the politics and ways of Congress are always mysterious, I am not assuming passage is a sure thing and I have no idea what the timeline for the bill's potential progress will be going forward. All I know is that it is now more than a quarter-century since the US Sentencing Commission first explained to Congress why a big crack/powder sentencing difference was unjustified and unjust, so the EQUAL Act cannot become law too soon and is way too late. But better late than never, I still hope.
Notably, we are already approaching three years since passage of the FIRST STEP Act and there is yet to be a next step. Though I would like to see many more statutory sentencing reform steps from Congress that go far beyond the EQUAL Act, I still think reforms can and should be happy right now with even baby steps in the right direction from a divided Congress. And, critically, the EQUAL Act would be a consequential baby step: USSC data indicate that more than 8000 people are in federal prison for crack offenses now and that more than 100 people are sentenced on crack offenses each month. So literally thousands of people will be impacted if the EQUAL Act becomes law, and then, if/when this reform is finally achieved, we can work on correcting the next and the next and the next injustice baked into federal sentencing law and practice.
A few prior related posts:
- An initial list of federal sentencing reforms to advance greater equity and justice for congressional consideration
- New efforts to fix the ugly old problem of sentencing disparity for federal crack and powder cocaine offenses
- Small, and not quite steady, reform progress in a not quite new era for criminal justice reform
- GOP Gov and former DEA chief calls for Congress to "finally and fully end the disparity between crack and cocaine offenses"
- US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing set for "Examining Federal Sentencing for Crack and Powder Cocaine"
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