Common sense replaces hysteria with high court's cocaine rulings

Young black and Latino men imprisoned during our 20-year war on crack cocaine see the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings allowing trial judges to show more leniency in drug-related cases, plus changes in the federal sentencing guidelines, as a holiday-timed offer of freedom.

Let others debate whether the court's 7-2 majorities in two cases — including one involving a crack-cocaine-related sentence — represent a civil-rights triumph unseen since Brown v. Board of Education. To really extend the historical imagery here, it is worth noting that this week in 1865 the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, went into effect.

Back to terra firma, where most of us reside. As a result of the U.S. Sentencing Commission's retroactive amendments, several thousand prisoners sentenced under the old guidelines may petition for early release in March. Inmates won't suddenly flood from prison gates swung open. Federal judges will decide cases individually. Dangerous prisoners won't make the cut.

The ones likely to benefit are the street sellers, mostly African Americans, who were dealt the heavy hand of the law while the dealers who sold them the powder cocaine they used to make crack got a less-punitive version of justice.

The uneven scales of justice used for crack and powder cocaine convictions grew in an era of hysteria. I remember the mid-'80s when the other Washington — known as one of the most beautiful cities in the world — became the murder capital of the world.

A new drug called crack was responsible. Emaciated figures with dead eyes and vacant lives were telltale signs that someone had crossed over from human to crack addict. You didn't have to do crack to be personally touched by it.

Family events were punctuated by an admonition to "hide your purse, cousin So-and-So is on crack."

Strolling around D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood, I once came upon a toddler in diapers near a woman lying in the yard. Dead or drugged out, I never discovered. Family members came out and unkindly invited me to move on. I had to work to shake the image of that child facing a life's deck already stacked taller than he was.

As a novice reporter, one of my first big stories was a federal drug trial that ended with a 20-something dealer sentenced to life in prison, no parole. At least he wouldn't be lonely. His father was already in prison. His mother, sisters and a cadre of friends and relatives were on trial with him.

This was the milieu in which congressional lawmakers tripped over themselves vying to be the toughest on crime. New federal guidelines meted out harsh justice to deter the crack scourge. It was a bipartisan, widely heralded event.

The law of unintended consequences took effect. The sentencing guidelines were meant to provide a dose of toughness but also uniformity in drug sentencing. Instead, it created two classes of drug prisoners. The result today is that 85 percent of the 19,500 federal inmates incarcerated on crack-related charges are African Americans.

Crack is cocaine. The same drug, used in different ways by different groups of people, has created a two-track system of justice. Justice is supposed to be colorblind. It should also be immune to whether a drug is snorted from a gilded mirror or cooked in an old, bent spoon.

The nightmarish scenario that fed the crack hysteria didn't come to pass. But crack use continues to devastate lives and families. Crack is a social ill on par with its predecessor, heroin, and its rural contemporary, methamphetamine.

It warrants attention but not "special treatment." Justice's uneven scales emptied communities of so many. My cynical mind says some of them were headed to prison anyway, and good riddance. But others were like Kemba Smith, a sweet-faced, middle-class college student from Virginia given a 24-year mandatory sentence for carrying drugs for her boyfriend.

Public outrage and media attention led former President Bill Clinton to commute Smith's sentence, but not before she did eight years hard time.

Others who got caught up in the war on drugs didn't make as compelling a media figure as Smith. For them, the Supreme Court's influential voice, coupled with judges empowered to use their own discretion, offers a glimmer of hope.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com