The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that a bipartisan law intended to allow new sentences for those convicted under onerous crack cocaine statutes does not apply to those with low-level possession convictions.
In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court said 2018’s First Step Act, signed with fanfare by President Donald Trump, makes resentencing available to those convicted of possessing amounts of crack that brought mandatory heightened punishment.
“The question here is whether crack offenders who did not trigger a mandatory minimum qualify,” Thomas wrote. “They do not.”
That conclusion seemed clear at oral argument in the case last month, although some justices questioned whether leaving out low-level offenders was Congress’s intent.
[Supreme Court skeptical that law helps all convicted of crack offenses]
Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with the outcome in Monday’s decision. But she wrote separately to chastise Thomas for including an “unnecessary, incomplete, and sanitized history” of what led Congress to impose far greater penalties for possession of crack cocaine than powder cocaine.
Black defendants were far more likely be convicted of crack crimes, while powder cocaine defendants were more likely to be White.
She also noted that some members of Congress involved in passing the First Step Act had asked the court to conclude that it covered small-amount convictions.
“Unfortunately, the text will not bear that reading,” she wrote. “Fortunately, Congress has numerous tools to right this injustice.”
A law Congress passed in 2010 mitigated the disparities between crack and powder cocaine. It increased from 50 to 280 grams the amount of crack that would trigger the most severe penalties. A second tier, with lesser possible sentences, was increased from five grams to 28 grams. But the section of the law concerning smaller amounts was not changed.
The First Step Act allowed those convicted under the old regime to have their sentences reduced. Tarahrick Terry, who received a nearly 16-year sentence for possessing less than five grams of crack, was among those who sought a sentence reduction.
But lower courts said the changes Congress made to the law did not affect him, and the Supreme Court agreed.
The case had an unusual history at the court. Even though Trump praised the First Step Act as a long-sought victory for minority communities, his Department of Justice interpreted the law to mean those like Terry did not benefit from it.
After President Biden was elected, the DOJ switched its view, and said Congress meant for it to allow all those convicted under the old crack regime to seek reduced sentences. That caused the Supreme Court to delay hearing the case and to appoint a lawyer to defend the opinion of the appeals court.
Thomas said Terry and the government “offer a sleight of hand” to obscure the clear text of the law.
The liberal Sotomayor, the court’s only Latina, took issue with part of the opinion by the conservative Thomas, the court’s only African American.
In recounting the history of Congress’ imposition of tough penalties on crack, Thomas said Black leaders at the time supported the legislation.
“First, crack was fueling crime against residents in inner cities, who were predominantly black,” Thomas wrote. And second, “there were concerns that prosecutors were not taking these kinds of crimes seriously enough because the victims were disproportionately black.”
Sotomayor said that the court’s majority opinion barely mentions the “real-world impact” of a regime that punished possession of crack cocaine far more harshly than powder cocaine.
She said the Congressional Black Caucus united to try to change the ratio.
“Bills to mitigate the disparity were introduced almost every year from 1993 to 2009,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet Congress did nothing until 2010.”
The case is Terry v. U.S.
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