>From SLATE: > Congress Reforms Disparities in Cocaine Sentencing > Congress approved changes to sentencing laws that have long been criticized > for being targeted toward blacks. A 1986 law established that a person > convicted of possessing crack cocaine gets the same mandatory prison term as > someone with 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine. The disparity won't > completely disappear with the reform, but it "reduces the ratio to about > 18-1," explains the Associated Press. The legislation now would apply a > five-year term to someone with 28 grams of crack, which is believed to be > what an average dealer would carry around. Significantly, the bill also gets > rid of the five-year mandatory minimum for first-time possession of crack, > which, as the AP notes, marks "the first time since the Nixon administration > that Congress has repealed a mandatory minimum sentence." The Senate passed > the legislation in March, and now it has to be signed by President Obama, who > expressed support for the change during his presidential campaign.
>Read original story in The Associated Press >[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072802969_pf.html] > | Wednesday, July 28, 2010 < > Commission on Civil Rights Focusing on Racism Against Whites > The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights raised eyebrows when it decided to look > into whether the Justice Department's decision to drop a case against the New > Black Panther Party was due to an unofficial policy of favoring black > defendants. A former Department of Justice lawyer has been pushing the > storyline, and several Republican senators seem to agree, that black members > of the New Black Panther Party carried out systematic efforts to intimidate > white voters in 2008. There's no real evidence that such intimidation took > place, but that doesn't matter. To many on the right, Eric Holder has > "transformed the Department of Justice into the Obama administration's action > arm for screwing white Americans," as Jason Zengerle puts it in the New > Republic. For the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, this latest investigation > "is part of a much larger pattern," writes Talking Points Memo, noting that > many of the cases the commission has dealt with under its conservative > leadership have to d! o with complaints of racism against white Americans. The two Democratic commissioners on the panel are frustrated by the efforts but they're virtually powerless since they can't call their own witnesses or select cases for the commission to investigate. > Read original story in Talking Points Memo > [http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/the_civil_rights_commission_protecting_the_rights.php] > | Wednesday, July 28, 2010 < -- Jim Devine "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
