ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 15, 1997 TAG: 9704150065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
The appeal proposed that harsher sentencing laws for crack than powder cocaine is a form of racism.
The Supreme Court steered clear Monday of the national debate over the diverse sentencing laws for crack and powder cocaine, an issue with racial and class overtones.
The court, without comment, rejected an appeal that challenged as racially discriminatory federal sentencing laws that punish crack cocaine offenders more harshly than those caught with powder cocaine.
Crime statistics indicate that crack is an inner-city drug, while powder cocaine is used more often in the suburbs.
Federal sentences for crack offenses are much stiffer than for any other drug and are handed out mostly to black defendants. In Roanoke, for example, 91 percent of crack defendants in federal court during 1994 and '95 were black; their average sentence was eight years.
Monday's action, not a ruling but merely a denial of review, let stand the 10-year prison sentence of a man convicted of distributing crack cocaine in the District of Columbia.
``There is a perception among African-Americans that there is no more unequal treatment by the criminal justice system than in the crack vs. powder cocaine, racially biased federal sentencing provisions,'' the justices were told by attorneys for Duane Edwards.
The appeal was submitted in Edwards' behalf by John C. Floyd III, who chairs the National Bar Association's criminal law section; Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree; and Los Angeles lawyer Johnnie Cochran, who successfully defended O.J. Simpson against murder charges.
The appeal noted that it takes 100 times more cocaine powder than crack to draw the same 10-year minimum sentence for drug trafficking.
People convicted of selling at least 50 grams of crack must be sentenced to 10 years, while a cocaine powder offender gets the same sentence only if it involves 5,000 grams or more.
``Can Congress pass a law that targets young, poor, African-American, urban males?'' Edwards' attorneys asked rhetorically.
Edwards was arrested by an undercover U.S. Park Police officer for attending a 1995 meeting at which another person sold 126.6 grams of crack cocaine to the officer for $3,400.
A federal appeals court previously had rejected Edwards' racial-bias argument.
``Congress has not acted with a discriminatory purpose in setting greater penalties for cocaine base crimes than for powder cocaine offenses,'' U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled.
Every federal appeals court that has studied such a challenge has rejected it, but the U.S. Sentencing Commission favors making the penalties the same for both kinds of cocaine.
Attorney General Janet Reno opposes such a move, saying that prison sentences must reflect the ``harsh and terrible impact'' of crack on U.S. communities.
States have their own sentencing laws for drug crimes prosecuted in state courts, but many prosecutors are taking ever-increasing numbers of drug cases to federal court because stiffer sentences are available.
In Roanoke, most drug cases that are prosecuted federally involve crack. Nationally, most federal drug cases involve powder cocaine.
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