Psyche, Science, and Society

Mildred Loving on the meaning of Loving v Virginia

Mildred Loving died May 2 at home in Virginia. Here is her statement prepared for delivery on June 12, 2007, the 4oth anniversary of Loving v Virginia. It was not that long ago that these ordinary heroes had to fight for the right to marry a partner of a different race. Gays and lesbians today are still fighting for the right to marry whom they choose:

Loving for All

By Mildred Loving

Prepared for Delivery on June 12, 2007,
The 40th Anniversary of the Loving vs. Virginia Announcement

When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn’t to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.

We didn’t get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn’t allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.

Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn’t have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” a “basic civil right.”

My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Add comment May 8th, 2008

Bronx students discuss Obama speech on race

A very moving video of Bronx students discussing Barack Obama’s speech on race. If discussions like this are occurring elsewhere in the country, it’s a very good sign for democracy. The Nation has referred to the Obama campaign’s community organizing. This video gives a sense of what that might mean to high school freshman who talk about being inspired to reject a life of crime and abuse and to aspire. Perhaps we’re on the cusp of some profound changes.

1 comment March 29th, 2008

Social psychology of racial equality: Unequal perspectives

The Washington Post today has an interesting exploration of new results on the social psychology of race relations. Whites, they report, think more about how far we’ve come from the bad old days, and think things are nearly fine. Blacks, however, think of how far we are from true equality and are profoundly disturbed. Whites claim they would be willing to be born black for a mere $5,000:

Unequal Perspectives on Racial Equality

By Shankar Vedantam

Imagine that you are waiting in line to be born . . . Presently, you are scheduled to be born white. However, you are offered an alternative arrangement. In exchange for a cash gift, to be deposited in a bank account for you when you are born, you can choose to instead be born black.

Social psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Mahzarin Banaji once asked white volunteers how much money would cover the “costs” of being born black instead of white. The volunteers guessed that about $5,000 ought to cover the lifetime disadvantages of being an average black person rather than an average white person, in the United States. By contrast, when asked how much they wanted to go without television, the volunteers demanded a million dollars.

Mazzocco and Banaji were taken aback: The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person, and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks earn 60 cents to the dollar compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. The black poverty rate is nearly twice the white poverty rate. Blacks tend to die five years earlier than whites; the infant mortality rate among black babies is nearly 1 1/2 times the rate among white babies. And because of long-standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth.

“The point we were making is, whatever the cost of being black might be, whites are vastly underestimating it,” said Mazzocco, of Ohio State University at Mansfield. “You throw in the 5-to-1 wealth gap . . . if you wanted to put a dollar-and-cents value on the difference, you would come up with a number much larger than $5,000.”

The unusual experiment is one of dozens that have found that whites tend to have a relatively rosy impression of what it means to be a black person in America. Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to believe that the position of African Americans has improved a great deal. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to believe that conditions for African Americans are growing worse.

This long-standing war of perceptions created the perfect storm last week after sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — former pastor of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) — painted a picture of stark inequality at odds with white perceptions.

Mazzocco and Banaji, who teaches at Harvard, found that when volunteers learned about the disparities, they started to demand much larger sums of money.

“Many whites assume blacks are making use of old crimes to gain present-day benefits that are unearned,” Mazzocco said. “Underlying this is a misunderstanding and ignorance about black costs and white privilege.”

But knowledge about disparities is not the only reason whites and blacks have different perceptions about racial equality. Social psychologist Richard Eibach at Yale University has shown that whites and blacks often employ different yardsticks to measure racial equality. Whites tend to measure progress by comparing the present and the past — and America has made giant strides since the Jim Crow era. Nonwhites, Eibach found, are likely to evaluate racial equality in comparison with an idealized future. These yardsticks create entirely different perceptions.

When Eibach asked each group to use the other’s yardstick — whites to focus on the future and nonwhites to think about the past — the differences disappeared. Now, everyone agreed the country had come a long way — and had a long way to go.

In a speech last week, Obama similarly argued that his former pastor had failed to acknowledge how America had changed for the better. But Wright’s critics, Obama added, were also wrong — because true equality is still remote.

The intriguing question prompted by Eibach’s study is why whites and blacks are unconsciously drawn to different yardsticks. Eibach said one reason might be that racial equality means different things to whites and blacks: Whites see it as an ideal, blacks as a necessity. When people evaluate progress toward idealistic or optional goals — saving for a vacation — they tend to focus on progress made. But when people think of necessities — paying the rent — they focus on how much they are short.

In another set of experiments, social psychologist Amanda Brodish at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research showed that prejudice may play a role, too. Whites with high levels of prejudice — who think blacks are not as smart as whites, who think blacks and whites are inherently unequal, and who reported being uncomfortable with a black roommate — invariably evaluated racial equality only in comparison with the past.

By contrast, said Brodish’s co-author, Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, low-prejudice whites were equally willing to apply the yardsticks of both past and future.

While comparisons with a dreadful past and an ideal future produce glass-is-half-empty-vs.-half-full perceptions, the choices are not equivalent. Each perception is accurate, but Eibach said that progress toward true equality required whites to focus on where the country ought to be instead of becoming complacent about how far the country had come.

“There is a disconnect between whites and blacks about what it feels like to be a victim of mundane discrimination,” Eibach concluded. “There is a tendency to say, ‘These mundane things are nothing like the past,’ but the lived reality of bearing that weight — the frustrations and indignities — that is a major source of the disconnect.”

Add comment March 24th, 2008

PBS series on health disparities: Unatural Causes

Apropos the New York Times article I posted earlier today o increasing health disparities between rich and poor in the US, a friend has just sent this notice of a related upcoming PBS series, Unnatural Causes, which asks “is inequality making us sick?” that starts this week. Here is the series summary that she sent:

UNNATURAL CAUSES sheds light on mounting evidence that demonstrates how work, wealth, neighborhood conditions and lack of access to power and resources can actually get under the skin and disrupt human biology as surely as germs and viruses. But it’s not just the poor who are sick—so are the middle classes. At each descending rung of the socio-economic ladder, people tend to be sicker and die sooner. What’s more, at every level, many communities of color are worse off than their white counterparts. Compelling personal stories—spanning the country—demonstrate how social conditions are as vital to our health as diet, smoking and exercise.  As Harvard epidemiologist David Williams points out, investing in our schools, improving housing, integrating neighborhoods, better jobs and wages, giving people more control over their work, these are as much health strategies as smoking diet and exercise. And these are the stories that UNNATURAL CAUSES tells.

HOUR ONE: In Sickness and In Wealth (56 mins) What are the connections between healthy bodies and healthy bank accounts? In Louisville, Kentucky, the issues faced by a CEO, a lab supervisor, a janitor, and a welfare mother bring into sharp relief how socio-economic status shapes opportunities to lead healthy lives.  People of color face an additional burden. Solutions, public health officials believe, lie not in more pills but in better social policies.

HOUR TWO: When the Bough Breaks (28 mins) and Becoming American (28 min)
Why do African American infant mortality rates remain more than twice as high as white Americans? Researchers are circling in on a provocative hypothesis:  the chronic stress of racism can become embedded in African American mothers’ bodies and take a toll on their children even before they leave the womb.

In contrast, recent Mexican immigrants, though often poorer, tend to be healthier than the average American. But the longer they live here, the worse their relative health becomes. What’s protective about new immigrant communities that we can all learn from? And what erodes this shield over time?

HOUR THREE: Bad Sugar (28 min) and Place Matters (28 min) The O’odham Indians of Arizona suffer one of the highest rates of Type 2 diabetes in the world. But is this due to their genes, or is it part of the body’s response to decades of poverty, oppression and historical trauma? A new approach rooted in the community re-gaining control over its destiny offers hope where medical-only interventions have failed.

Why is your street address such a good predictor of your health? How can your surrounding built and social environment get inside your body like smog and toxic waste? As recent immigrants move into long-neglected African American urban neighborhoods, their health is beginning to deteriorate too. What can be done to create healthy communities?

HOUR FOUR:  Collateral Damage (28 min) and Not Just a Paycheck (28 min)

Globalization and the U.S. military have disrupted the lives of Marshall Islanders. Many have ended up in the unlikely place of Springdale, Arkansas where a legacy of poverty and powerlessness continues to take a toll on their bodies.

In western Michigan, a factory closure undermines the lives and health of a white, working class community. But the same company shut down their Swedish plant with hardly a ripple thanks to very different social policies.

http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/

Add comment March 23rd, 2008

The Obama Speech

If anyone hasn’t seen Obama’s speech on race today:

1 comment March 18th, 2008

US: The prison society

Derrick Z. Jackson reminds us of the barbarity of our society, which imprisons 6% of its black males and 1% of its adult population, far more than any other country on earth. Combine that with the fact that the US spends as much on its War Department as all other nations on earth and we see the magnitude of the institutional violence upon which our country is based:

Prisoners of sentencing politics

by Derrick Z. Jackson

WITH ODIOUS sanctimony, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice released the annual State Department human rights report. She praised people around the world who work “to hold their leaders accountable and to achieve equal justice under the law.”

The report knocked Russia’s “selectivity in enforcement of the law,” Burma’s “abysmal” level of “indefinite detentions,” Iran’s “arbitrary arrests,” Syria’s trying of “political prisoners in criminal courts,” and China’s “20 percent increase over 2006 in convictions of citizens under China’s overly broad state security law.”

In specific numbers, the report cited China’s 1.8 million inmates and Russia’s 889,600 prisoners, the latter of whom languish in “extremely harsh” and “overcrowded” facilities where “one in 25 was HIV-positive.” Rice wrote in the report’s preface, “Leaders who are insufficiently committed to reform may revert to authoritarian habits or take disastrous detours from the rule of law.”

Missing from the State Department report was the disastrous detour of our own nation. Our inflexible reforms have for two decades turned nonviolent criminals into prisoners of politics.

The United States is the world’s leading prison state. For the first time in our history, more than one out of every 100 adults is behind bars. We have 2.3 million people in jail or prison, according to a Pew Center on the States study released last month. Our rate of imprisonment easily beats second-place Russia and is six times the rate of China, seven times the rate of Germany or France, 10 times the rate of Italy, and 12 times the rate of Japan.

State spending on prisons has grown from $12 billion in 1987 to $49 billion last year. For that, we still have overcrowded prisons where the rate of HIV/AIDS is 2.5 times that of the general population.

The reason is not crime, not when our total levels declined in the 1990s to under those of the European Union, according to the United Nations. But the impact of mandatory federal and state drug laws enacted during the crack panic of the 1980s - and never changed when the panic over drug trade violence proved unjustified - continue to devastate communities and state budgets.

The most well known of those laws are the ones that treat possession of crack cocaine much more harshly than for being caught with powdered cocaine. The Supreme Court is taking an ever-dim view of the laws and the federal US Sentencing Commission has softened them somewhat. But there is no State Department concern for black men.

One in 15 adult black men are behind bars, compared with 1 in 106 adult white men. This is despite the fact that Americans consume illegal drugs at about their racial share of the population, that crack and powder are the same pharmacologically, and that the majority of the drug trade, including crack, is nonviolent. It is wrong that crack offenders, 70 percent of them nonviolent, spend on average 3 1/2 years more in jail (10.8 years to 7.2 years) than those convicted of powder offenses.

Of the presidential candidates, Republican John McCain is likely to march to President Bush’s agenda. The Democrats are not unified in their desire to end this madness. In the 1990s, President Clinton wooed black votes, then sacrificed the black poor to his centrist politics, calling the 1994 crime bill that preserved the disparate laws the “smartest crime bill in the history of the United States.”

Fourteen years later - years which include the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections that Democrats narrowly lost as 13 percent of black men could not vote because of convictions, according to the Sentencing Project - Clinton called the laws he maintained “a cancer.” He pledged to “spend a significant portion of whatever life I’ve got left on the earth trying to fix this.”

Then again, Clinton is still sacrificing black people, almost single-handedly inciting a stampede of undecided black voters from his wife’s presidential campaign toward Barack Obama with ham-handed, racially tinged denigration of Obama.

Both Hillary Clinton and Obama say the laws are unfair. But only Obama approved of the recent decision by the bipartisan Sentencing Commission to “mitigate the unwarranted sentencing disparity” by granting mild retroactive reductions of crack sentences for mostly nonviolent offenders. Clinton’s response was, “I have problems with retroactivity.” As Condoleezza Rice rails about nations insufficiently committed to reform, we remain at high risk at home of staying on our disastrous detour.

Derrick Z. Jackson’s e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

Add comment March 15th, 2008

Palast: The destruction of Spitzer and the bank bailout

As is often the case, Greg Palast provides a unique vantage point on the destruction of Elliot Spitzer, connecting it to the $200 billion bailout of the criminal suprime banks. [Complementing Palast are a number of pieces by Scott Horto arguing that the case against Spitzer is politically-motivated. See here, here, and here. Horton, however, views it through the lens of the (In)Justice Department's long-standing campaign to criminalize Democrats.]:

The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

By Greg Palast
Reporting for Air America Radio’s Clout

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and it’s variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chuck of these ‘sub-prime.’

Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 a month payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hardy – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”

What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinnings, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bail-out. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.

And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” - made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which he federal government was turning a blind eye.”

Bush, said Spitzer right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.

A note on “Prosecutorial Indiscretion.”

Back in the day when I was an investigator of racketeers for government, the federal prosecutor I was assisting was deciding whether to launch a case based on his negotiations for airtime with 60 Minutes. I’m not allowed to tell you the prosecutor’s name, but I want to mention he was recently seen shouting, “Florida is Rudi country! Florida is Rudi country!”

Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It’s up to something called “prosecutorial discretion.”

Funny thing, this ‘discretion.’ For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him.
Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer – rarely done in these cases - was made at the ‘discretion’ of Bush’s Justice Department.

Or maybe we should say, ‘indiscretion.’

Listen to Palast on Clout at www.GregPalast.com

Add comment March 14th, 2008

Geraldine Ferraro when racism had no political utility

Geraldine Ferraro expressed quite different sentiments to the New York Times before she was a hack for Hilary Clinton:

“All evidence is that a white female has an advantage over a black male — for reasons of our cultural heritage,” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the civil rights leader who ran for president in 1984 and 1988. Still, he said, for African-American and female candidates, “It’s easier — emphatically so.”

Ms. Ferraro offered a similar sentiment. “I think it’s more realistic for a woman than it is for an African-American,” said Ms. Ferraro. “There is a certain amount of racism that exists in the United States — whether it’s conscious or not it’s true.”

“Women are 51 percent of the population,” she added.

[h/t TalkingPointsMemo.]

Keith Olberman Special Comment on the Clinton campaign:

1 comment March 13th, 2008

Steve Earle: Over Yonder

Add comment February 6th, 2008

Supreme Court allows sentencing leniency

As the U.S. has filled its prisons with millions of, mostly young minority males, many on often minor drug charges. While the War on Drugs has been a total failure at addressing the extent of substance abuse in our society, it has been ripe with abuses. The symbol of this abuse in recent years has been the extreme sentencing discrepancy between those arrested for selling crack, as opposed to powered cocaine. Those of us in substance abuse treatment know that there is essentially no difference between crack and cocaine, except for the common differences in who sells and uses them: crack — poor blacks; cocaine — middle class to wealthy whites. As all attempts to reform theses sentencing disparities have failed, federal judges have taken to using modest discretion in interpreting sentencing guidelines. The Bush administration, terrified by the humanity exemplified by the judges actions, tried to get the Supreme Court to put a stop to judicial discretion. Today, in a 7-2 decision, the SCOTUS said “NO” to the Bush administration. Adam B at Daily Kos explains:

SCOTUS: Let judges be merciful

Derrick Kimbrough is, no doubt, a bad man. In 2004 he pleaded guilty to four offenses: conspiracy to distribute crack and powder; possession with intent to distribute more than 50 grams of crack (he acknowledged 56 grams); possession with intent to distribute powder (92.1 grams); and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking offense. His plea subjected him to a minimum term of 15 years and a maximum of life, with the guidelines reccomending 19-22.5 years. The trial judge thought that such treatment exemplified the “disproportionate and unjust effect that crack cocaine guidelines have in sentencing,” noted that if Kimbrough had possessed only powder cocaine, his Guidelines range would have been far lower: 8-9 years. So the judge did the best he could, and sentenced him to the minimum of 15 years.

The Bush Administration didn’t like this and appealed, claiming that the judge should have had no discretion to consider the crack/powder disparity in sentencing him.

In a 7-2 opinion by Justice Ginsburg handed down this morning, the Supreme Court rebuked the Bush Administration and has given judges permission to deviate downwards from the draconian federal guidelines to consider the disparity in treatment between crack and powder cocaine.

Under the federal sentencing guidelines, a drug trafficker dealing in crack cocaine is subject to the same sentence as one dealing in 100 times more powder cocaine. These were guidelines drawn up in 1986 at the dawn of the crack epidemic, but they yield bizarre, unjust results. As the bipartisan U.S. Sentencing Commission had explained to Congress, “Although chemically similar, crack and powder cocaine are handled very differently for sentencing purposes. The 100-to-1 ratio yields sentences for crack offenses three to six times longer than those for powder offenses involving equal amounts of drugs.” More:

“[T]he Commission concluded that the crack/powder disparity is inconsistent with the 1986 Act’s goal of punishing major drug traffickers more severely than low-level dealers. Drug importers and major traffickers generally deal in powder cocaine, which is then converted into crack by street-level sellers. … But the 100-to-1 ratio can lead to the ‘anomalous’ result that ‘retail crack dealers get longer sentences than the wholesale drug distributors who supply them the powder cocaine from which their crack is produced.’

“Finally, the Commission stated that the crack/powder sentencing differential ‘fosters disrespect for and lack of confidence in the criminal justice system’ because of a ‘widely-held perception’ that it ‘promotes unwarranted disparity based on race.’ [] Approximately 85 percent of defendants convicted of crack offenses in federal court are black; thus the severe sentences required by the 100-to-1 ratio are imposed ‘primarily upon black offenders.’ ”

The Sentencing Commission has repeatedly urged Congress to act and amend this disparity; it has failed to do so. In the meantime, the sentencing guidelines have shifted from mandatory to advisory on trial judges (long story), so the question remained whether deviating from this 100:1 ratio was something that judges could do on their own. Today’s ruling says yes, they can, and you can read it here, along with much discussion of how LSD sentencing works in America.

Justices Thomas and Alito dissented, with Thomas venting about how he doesn’t like the Court’s whole approach to the sentencing guidelines, and Alito briefly arguing that the guidelines were entitled to more weight.

In a second 7-2 opinion today, the Court further extended judicial discretion in sentencing, allowing a trial court judge to sentence a University of Iowa undergrad low-dollar ecstasy dealer ($30K netted) to 36 months probation, rather than that same length in jail, based on his clean living as a construction subcontractor since his arrest.

Given the constant ratcheting-up of sentences by politicians looking to be “tough on crime,” today’s decisions should help tremendously in allowing judges to be just, humane and merciful.

Add comment December 10th, 2007