The Supreme Court said Monday that judges may impose shorter prison terms for crack cocaine crimes, enhancing judicial discretion to reduce the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine powder.
By a 7-2 vote, the court said that a 15-year sentence given to Derrick Kimbrough, a black veteran of the 1991 war with Iraq, was acceptable, even though federal sentencing guidelines called for Kimbrough to receive 19 to 22 years.
The decision was announced ahead of a vote scheduled for Tuesday by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets the guidelines that could cut prison time for up to an estimated 19,500 federal inmates convicted of crack crimes.
Tuesday's vote is whether to apply the guidelines retroactively, in which current prisoners will have their cases investigated and possibly changed. New guidelines took effect Nov. 1 after Congress took no action to overturn the change.
Congress wrote the harsher treatment for crack into a law that sets a mandatory minimum five-year prison sentence for trafficking in 5 grams of crack cocaine or 100 times as much cocaine powder. The law also sets maximum terms.
Seventy percent of crack defendants are given the mandatory prison terms. The remaining 30 percent get even more time in prison because they are convicted of trafficking in more than the amount of crack that triggers the minimum sentences.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens formed the majority in the case. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
The case is known as Kimbrough v. U.S., 06-6330.
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