Senators Take Important Step Toward Ending United States Drug War The Huffington Post
go to original January 31, 2014

The US Attorney General Eric Holder's Weekly Video Message: Sentencing Reform (Helmut Zermin)

Republicans and Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee came together on Thursday morning to pass a landmark bill aimed at overhauling the federal government’s drug sentencing laws. Those laws, adopted by the U.S. at the height of the anti-drug fervor of the 1980s, have helped make the United States prison system the largest in the world.

The Smarter Sentencing Act, introduced last summer by Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), would reform the nation’s mandatory minimum statutes, which require judges to impose fixed sentences on people convicted of drug offenses, even when the judges deem those sentences excessively severe.

The bill would shorten such sentences, while also giving judges more authority to use their own discretion in doling out punishments. And it would allow thousands of current inmates to return to court to seek fairer sentences in accordance with the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, a measure that reduced the vast sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine crimes.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

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