Countless Delays to Reduce Sentences

One month ago the racially disparate laws amid powder and crack cocaine changed to reduce prison sentences for 20,000 inmates nationally. While dozens of individuals have been released from prison, many others have not. According to the Los Angeles Times April 3, 2008 article,("Freedom Eludes Many Crack Inmates") 'The delays appear to be due in part to a procedural bottleneck: Federal judges there [North Carolina] did not approve a plan for processing requests for sentence reductions until five days before the new rules were to go into effect. Courts in parts of Texas and south Florida also appear to be lagging. When the rules were approved, the commission deferred the effective date until March 3 to give courts time to prepare. As of Tuesday, the federal Bureau of Prisons said it had received 3,077 signed orders from judges modifying the sentences of prisoners nationwide. The prisons bureau won't say how many have actually been released; even after the reductions, some inmates will still have much time to serve."

The article adds, "In Dallas, one judge has refused to allow federal defenders to represent crack offenders in his court, saying they have no right to counsel at this stage of the proceedings. That has left hundreds of inmates having to file jailhouse petitions to gain their freedom. After that ruling, the federal public defender in Dallas, Richard Anderson, sent out a mass mailing to several hundred eligible inmates to help them prepare their cases. Many of the inmates' applications are incomplete or have errors. The complexities of federal sentencing law have caused added confusion. The delays stand in sharp contrast to the experience in other regions of the country where the new rules have unleashed an outpouring of federal clemency."

The article notes, "The process seems to be working best in jurisdictions where prosecutors, judges and probation officers were working weeks and in some cases months in advance of the effective date to mitigate delays. Lee T. Lawless, a federal public defender in St. Louis, said his office had a standing agreement with the U.S. attorney that unless an inmate had posed a clear public safety threat or had received an unusually lenient sentence, the government would not stand in the way of the reductions. Parks N. Small, a federal public defender in Columbia, S.C., said his office had been engaged in "triage" for months to make sure prisoners eligible for immediate release received attention. About 80 sentence-reduction orders were signed the first week of March, including "a couple of mistakes who got out a week or two early." Dozens of other inmates have been granted sentence reductions in West Virginia, Florida and Ohio, among other states."