U.S. Sentencing Commission Finally Makes it Official, Approves Retroactivity
By Derek Gilna
It’s always hard for the federal government to say it’s sorry, especially when its mistakes ruined tens of thousands of lives, gutted inner-city neighborhoods, and cost taxpayers billions of dollars, but the Sentencing Commission’s decision to give non-violent drug offenders substantial sentence reductions is a move in the right direction. This action that will affect at least twenty percent of current federal prisoners and thousands of others currently awaiting sentencing, not to mention their families, by making the two-level reduction of drug levels retroactive.
Attorney General Holder said, “This is a milestone in the effort to make more efficient use of our law enforcement resources and to ease the burden of our overcrowded prison system.” Senator Patrick Leahy, one of the sponsors for sentence relief legislation still pending in the U.S. Senate, commented that the changes were “an important step toward responsibly addressing our unsustainable prison population.”
Bowing to the admittedly dysfunctional governmental agency, known as the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) now tasked with implementing this landmark change, the Commission delayed full implementation until November of 2015. Prison officials and halfway houses now have months to make adjustments to handle the flood of soon-to-be-released prisoners.
However, the decision also reflects that the federal court system will also need close to a year to review and adjudicate the thousands of case filings that can be filed immediately. The number of filings under this new reduction will dwarf the filings made under the crack law. Petitions filed this year will still take months to work their way through the courts before formal release orders can be issued.
What the vote means is that the amount of time a federal drug prisoner received at sentencing will not be his “out date.” However, this will not be an automatic process, any more than crack law releases were automatic. The Commission’s order is still subject to interpretation by the courts, and possible objections from prosecutors as to whether or no the individual is eligible for relief.
