Posts Tagged‘news’

Understanding the Sentencing Reform Act

The 5-year mandatory sentence given to those with as little as 5 grams of crack cocaine – the same mandatory sentence given to those with 500 grams of powder cocaine – was considered unfair. The disparity causes a lot of African-Americans involved in non-violent drug-related cases to serve the same amount of sentence as Caucasian, violent offenders. This disparity was reformed by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, reducing the 100:1 ratio all the way to 18:1 in an attempt to provide fairer sentencing. According to experts from the online criminal justice program of Portland State University, however, the 18:1…