WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court decided Monday that judges may impose lighter sentences for crack cocaine, adding its voice to a racially sensitive debate over federal guidelines that call for tougher penalties for crack than for powder cocaine.
The crack-cocaine decision was one of two Monday in which the justices, with identical seven-member majorities, reinforced their view that federal sentencing guidelines are advisory rather than mandatory, and that judges may deviate from them so long as their decisions are reasonable.
In the crack case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it was reasonable for a federal judge in Virginia to impose a lower sentence than one prescribed by the guidelines because of his disagreement with the rule that imposed the same sentence for a crack dealer as for someone selling 100 times as much powder cocaine. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said the law did not allow the judge to make such a determination.
But Ginsburg wrote that “the cocaine guidelines, like all other guidelines, are advisory only” and that “the court of appeals erred in holding the crack/powder disparity effectively mandatory.”
The disparity has been challenged by civil-rights groups because crack is most often used by African-Americans, powder cocaine by whites, thus subjecting blacks to the tougher penalties. The court’s decision did not touch on that argument.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission this year adopted guidelines, which went into effect last month, that substantially lessen the disparity, and it is scheduled to vote today on whether nearly 20,000 prisoners sentenced under the old guidelines should be eligible to ask courts to cut their sentences.
The court also agreed that a judge was within his rights to impose a light sentence for a man convicted of conspiracy to sell 10,000 pills of the drug Ecstasy.
The guidelines said that the man, Brian Gall, should be sentenced to at least 30 months in jail. But a federal judge in Iowa said Gall had quit the drug business years before authorities had found evidence of his involvement and had turned his life around. The judge sentenced him to probation.
The government appealed the sentence, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed that the sentence was out of line.
The Supreme Court Monday reversed, saying the judge had not abused his discretion to decide the proper sentence in an individual case.
“Courts of appeals must review all sentences — whether inside, just outside, or significantly outside the guidelines range — under a deferential abuse-of-discretion standard,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court. He added that the “sentence imposed by the experienced district judge in this case was reasonable.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented in both cases.
The decision will probably accelerate a mild trend toward more lenient sentencing. But if history is any guide, judges will continue to use their sentencing power relatively sparingly, specialists in sentencing law said.
The two decisions built on a 2005 decision that made the federal sentencing guidelines advisory rather than mandatory, which led to the modest trend toward leniency.
Now that the Supreme Court has again emphasized that federal trial judges have the discretion to move outside the guidelines, further departures are rather likely. But the size of that may not be huge, said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University.
“The really interesting question,” Berman said, “is whether we get a more significant gravitation away from the guidelines.”
The decisions also only concerned the federal system, a relatively small part of the overall criminal-justice system. But the concerns expressed by the justices are quite likely to have a broad impact.
“The system is interconnected and hydraulic enough,” Berman said, “so that anything that happens in the bigger and in some sense badder federal criminal-justice system will trickle down.”
The New York Times contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press
