"Cocaine Cases in Limbo as End Looms for Sentencing Disparity"

The title of this post is the title of this interesting article in today's New Jersey Law Journal. Here are excerpts:

The Obama administration's call for the elimination of mandatory jail terms for certain crack-cocaine offenders is beginning to filter down to U.S. Attorneys' Offices, but not fast enough for defense lawyers.

The administration announced in April that it favors reform of a 20-year-old law that mandates a sentence of at least five years for possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine with intent to distribute and the same penalty for five grams of crack cocaine.... Bills to end the disparity have been introduced in Congress and [Assistant Attorney General Lanny] Breuer told the legislators that the administration also will develop recommendations....

Some defense lawyers say the Justice Department doesn't need to wait for legislation to end the disparity.  Yet it is impossible to tell from the Justice Department's guidance to U.S. attorneys whether anything has changed in the trenches.  And while the government figures out what it wants to do, a request for adjournments of sentencings may be one of the defense strategies....

The chief issue is what the Justice Department had in mind when it sent guidance to U.S. attorneys after Breuer's April 29 testimony, at a Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing, calling for an end to the disparity.  Justice Department spokesman Ross Weingarten declines to discuss what the department told U.S. attorneys beyond saying the instructions were in keeping with Breuer's testimony.  And there isn't much meat in the version that U.S. Attorneys' Offices are circulating to defense counsel either in memo form or in conversation....

Michael Nachmanoff, the federal public defender in Alexandria, Va., who testified before Congress last year on behalf of his colleagues around the country, says prosecutors can put the policy into effect, particularly in its charges in cases involving 50 or more grams of crack. Conviction with that amount requires a 10-year minimum sentence, the same as for more than 5,000 grams of powder cocaine. "Lanny Breuer said point blank that the ratio should be 1-to-1," Nachmanoff says. "Prosecutors around the country today could start charging on a 1-1 ratio and avoid the mandatory minimums."

Cases in the pipeline would be more difficult, but when it comes time to sentence those offenders, prosecutors could seek to vacate the conviction with the idea of following with an information charging possession of lesser amount that don't trigger the mandatory sentences, he says. "Unfortunately, there is a gap between the expression of a changed policy on the part of the assistant attorney general and what is happening in the field," he says.

He says that in talking to defense lawyers around the country, "what we see is there is a huge amount of variation in the way prosecutors are handling these cases, even within a district to district." "In some parts of the country, prosecutors are telling a judge the 1-1 ratio is the way to go, but it sounds like prosecutors in New Jersey or other states maybe aren't saying that clearly or acting that way," Nachmanoff says.

In the meantime, defense lawyers are attaching copies of Breuer's testimony to their sentencing pleadings "and telling judges, 'this is the position of the Justice Department, whatever the people in the field are saying,' " Nachmanoff says.

Some related recent posts on crack sentencing debates:  

• Is the new DOJ about to crack the stalemate over fixing the crack disparity?
• Watching the webcast of the Senate crack disparity hearing
• New York Times editorial on crack sentencing
• With the new DOJ advocating completely eliminating crack/powder disparity, now what?
• Has there been any in-court impact from DOJ's new crack sentencing policy?
• Thoughtful new district court opinion adopting 1:1 crack/powder ratio