WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that low-level crack cocaine offenders convicted more than a decade ago can’t take advantage of a 2018 federal law to seek reduced prison time.
The justices affirmed the nearly 16-year prison term handed out to Tarahrick Terry of Florida, who was arrested with 3.9 grams of crack on him in 2008.
Terry’s case concerned the reach of the First Step Act, a bipartisan 2018 law signed by former President Donald Trump. Aimed at reducing racial disparities in sentencing, the law allows prisoners convicted of older crack crimes to seek reduced sentences.
But the law specifically addresses crack possession only above 5 grams for one category of possession and above 50 grams for another category.
That allowed crack cocaine kingpins to seek reduced sentences, but it left convicts like Terry in a legal limbo, with courts around the country coming to different conclusions.
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In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the high court said Terry and those like him who were not subject to a mandatory prison term based on how much crack they possessed are out of luck.
“The question here is whether crack offenders who did not trigger a mandatory minimum qualify. They do not,” Thomas wrote.
Terry is in the final months of his prison term. And he apparently is serving his remaining time on home confinement, according to the Biden administration.
The outcome probably affects no more than a couple hundred prison inmates since most people convicted of possessing relatively little crack that long ago already have finished serving their sentences.
The 2018 law, like the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, was partly aimed at addressing disparities, which fell disproportionately hard on Black people, in the treatment of people convicted of crack and powder cocaine offenses.
The case only affects people whose crimes took place before August 2010 because the Fair Sentencing Act took effect then and covered crimes committed from that point forward.
The Trump administration had argued that Terry is not eligible to seek a sentence reduction, but the Biden administration changed course.
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SCOTUS actually made a good decision. I am in shock!
GOOD. New laws, making things more lenient, SHOULD NEVER be retroactively applied.
“If you got that lose, you wanna kick them blues—Cocaine”
She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie—Cocaine—Eric Clapton
It is a dead-end street that too many people travel
Perhaps the great class and social justice warrior president of ours could give us a few mumblings of his scattered thought on the injustice and systemic racism of a black man getting 16 years while the son of a white liberal politician gets nothing and is free to continue harassing strippers.
SCOTUS’ “disparate impact” precedent, which treats any rule/law/policy that affects members of one demographic group more or less than those of another as de facto discrimination, is among the most socially corrosive decisions of the 20th Century–supplying the legal justification for racial quotas/Affirmative Action (i.e., legalized discrimination), and the novel moral foundation for the Grievance Industry™ and identity politics in general.
Well put. IMO They have made a # of massive blunders, but to me, that (along with Roe vs wade) have been the TWO BIGGEST.