Blog - Articles Tagged 'Fair Sentencing Act'

Congress Links for Thursday, July 29th - to be continually updated over the day. Senate Democrats call for fillibuster reform. (CBS News) Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) faces ethics charges around 1pm ET today: latest news and blog coverage on him from around the Web, aggregated here on OC. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee unsure if hearing over New Start arms treaty with Russia will occur. (NY Times, and Associated Press). Congress passed S. 1789 -Fair Sentencing ...

Criminal penalties for crack versus powder cocaine touch on a wide range of issues from race to state budgets to overcrowding of prisons. The Senate Judiciary Committee today took on the issue by unanimously voting to advance a bill that would reduce the wide disparity in sentencing for possession of the two.

Did you know that under current law it takes only 5 grams of crack cocaine to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence of five years, but it takes 500 grams to trigger the same sentence for possession of powder cocaine? That's a 100:1 ratio, and, since crack cocaine is generally an poor, urban, black drug and powder cocaine is generally an upper-class, white, suburban drug, it looks a lot like institutionalized racism.