Obama Represents His People The Crack-Cocaine Nation

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But Pollard deserves 30 years he only be's a Jew

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/12/23/dewayne-wickham-crack-powder-commutations-column/4165621/

Thank you, Mr. President, for commuting the sentences last week of eight people who were imprisoned under a law that tilted the scales of justice way out of balance.

For nearly two decades, members of The Trotter Group -- a small band of black columnists -- have pressed Oval Office occupants in person and in our columns to end the unfair, mandatory difference in the sentencing of people convicted of possessing crack and powder cocaine. Obama has done more to right this awful wrong than any of his predecessors.

Under the cocaine sentencing law, which was embedded in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, federal judges were forced to give people convicted of possessing 5 grams of crack cocaine and 500 grams of powder cocaine the same prison sentence. This disparity was born at a time in this country when the call for "law and order" was more of a race-baiting political mantra than a meaningful crime-fighting strategy.

Back then, powder cocaine was widely seen as a recreational drug, while crack cocaine was said to spark the violence that afflicted America's urban core. In fact, the drugs were a difference without a significant distinction, except for one: Powder cocaine was used mostly by whites; crack cocaine was used disproportionately by blacks.

In November 1995, shortly after the U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended getting rid of the crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity, The Trotter Group had a White House meeting with President Clinton. I asked him why he hadn't acted to reduce the unfair impact this disparity was having on blacks. "I don't want to lower the penalties for crack trafficking," Clinton answered. "I think the penalties for (powder) cocaine trafficking should be raised."

Two years later, when The Trotter Group returned to the White House, Newsday columnist Les Payne kept up the pressure on Clinton. "One of the forms of discrimination that many people feel that your administration has abetted, if not directly participated in," Payne told Clinton, was the crack-powder sentencing disparity.

Clinton said his initial embrace of the federal law that required 100 times more powder cocaine to crack cocaine to result in the same sentence had been a "Hobson's choice." The bill Congress passed gave him no option because it contained a lot of crime fighting tools his administration needed.

President George W. Bush, who did nothing to end the sentencing disparity, never met with us. And while Clinton publicly apologized in 2008 for not doing more to close the sentencing gap, it was Obama who pushed for -- and got -- Congress to make a big move in the right direction. In August 2010, he signed a bipartisan bill that reduced the powder-to-crack sentencing disparity to 18-to-1.

But this change did nothing for the many blacks who were given long prison sentences under the old law. So when The Trotter Group met last week with Attorney General Eric Holder, our focus turned to righting that wrong.

"The joke is that (President Obama has) pardoned more turkeys than he's pardoned deserving inmates," Askia Muhammad, of The Washington Informer, told Holder.

"We are at year five I guess of eight, and so I would say hold on," the attorney general answered.

Seven days later, the Obama administration announced the clemencies -- a decision that moved Payne to phone me with this quip: "Obama 8, turkeys 5."

Commuting those sentences, the president said, "is an important step toward restoring fundamental ideals of justice and fairness. But it must not be the last."

He's right. Congress now should move quickly to offer legislative relief to those who remain behind bars because of the bad sentencing policy it enacted.