Eric Holders best work
Attorney General Eric Holder, who last week said he plans to step down as soon as Congress approves his replacement, sees criminal-justice reform as the signature achievement of his 5/ years in office.
He is probably right about that, especially since his record on civil liberties and executive power is almost uniformly awful.
Despite a late start, Holder has done more to highlight the harm inflicted by our excessively punitive criminal-justice system than any of his predecessors.
And he has done more than talk, pursuing policies that will imprison fewer people who dont belong behind bars, or at least free them sooner.
Between 1996, when he was the US attorney for the District of Columbia, and 1999, when he was deputy attorney general, Holder went from advocating stiffer drug penalties to conceding that there are some questions that we ought to ask about mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
This turnaround probably was related to Holders concern about racially skewed justice, which was starkly illustrated by the draconian penalties imposed on federal crack offenders, who are overwhelmingly black.
By the time Holder was appointed attorney general in 2009, he favored equal treatment for the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine. Although Congress didnt go that far, in 2010 it shrank the gap substantially.
Yet Holder continued to send mixed signals about mandatory minimums. When the US Sentencing Commission adjusted its guidelines in light of the new crack-to-powder ratio, he urged it not to make the changes fully retroactive.
Had the commission listened to Holder, the number of prisoners eligible for shorter sentences would have been reduced from about 12,000 to about 5,500.
Crack sentencing reform was the one bright spot in Barack Obamas drug policy during his first term as president, when he was remarkably stingy with commutations and broke his promise not to interfere with state laws allowing medical use of marijuana.
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Eric Holders best work