Assailing the new expanded mandatory minimum for "career offenders" being pushed by AG Jeff Sessions

As noted in prior posts here and here, earlier this month Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a big speech advocating for reform to the Armed Career Criminal Act in part as a response to the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Johnson finding a part of ACCA vague.  Writing at The American Prospect, Manuel Madrid has this new piece unpacking the particulars of this effort.  The full headline and subheadline summarizes the themes of the piece: "Jeff Sessions and the Conservative Nostalgia for Harsh Sentencing: A new Republican bill would slap nonviolent criminals with 15-year mandatory minimum sentences. White-collar crimes, property crimes, and drug-related offenses would all count toward being considered a 'career armed criminal'.”  Here are some excerpts:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s full-court press for more tough-on-crime policies has found a home in Congress.  Speaking before a crowd of law enforcement officials and prosecutors ... in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sessions called for legislation to reinstate an aggressive Reagan-era sentencing law that targets repeat offenders....

About an hour before the speech, Republican Senators Orrin Hatch of Utah, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina offered a glimpse into what such a fix would look like with their new bill, the Restoring the Armed Career Criminal Act of 2018. The proposed legislation revises the language in the original act and broadens its scope to avoid possible legal challenges, while extending hefty mandatory minimum prison sentences to violent and nonviolent criminals alike....

While the original act might have been defended on the grounds that it at least attempted to hone in on some violent criminals, the Cotton-Hatch-Graham redux abandons all pretenses of even trying.  Under the new bill, nonviolent crimes such as identity theft, fraud, and money laundering could earn a person the label of armed career criminal. And the list goes on: Property crimes like burglary and theft and a score of drug-related crimes would all be on the table.

Before the 2015 Supreme Court decision, about 600 offenders were charged each year under the Armed Career Criminal Act. That number dropped to 265 last year.  The change would likely open the floodgates to more mandatory minimum prison sentences, which already disproportionately affect minorities.  In 2017, more than half of felons charged with unlawful possession of a firearm were black and almost 20 percent were Hispanic.  Only 4.4 percent were charged as armed career criminals....

During his time in the Senate, Sessions, along with Senator Cotton, persuaded other Republicans to join them in torpedoing a bipartisan sentencing reform bill in 2016 which would have shortened existing mandatory minimums and narrowed the scope of drug convictions that triggered them....

The drastic expansion of the Armed Career Criminal Act proposed in the Cotton-Hatch-Graham bill would accelerate the federal government’s backsliding on criminal justice, achieving little more than earning the praise from a minority of conservative politicians nostalgic for the hardline policies of decades past.

Prior related posts:

• "Attorney General Sessions Delivers Remarks Calling for a Legislative Fix to the Armed Career Criminal Act" 
• Senators Orrin Hatch and Tom Cotton proposing Johnson fix to expand reach of Armed Career Criminal Act