Fair Sentencing Act of 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Let me thank Chairman Scott, Chairman Conyers, and also let me thank my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who see the wisdom of moving forward based on what we know about the disparity in crack cocaine sentencing now, what we've learned over the years, thank all of them for yielding to evidence, which I think is so important.

Before I ever came to Congress, Mr. Speaker, I spent the better part of my life representing people in the courts of our country as a public defender and representing them in the courts of our country in Federal and State court, and I saw so many of these cases. I think what disgusted me the most is the human potential that would just be thrown away, as I would have to tell a young person who was caught with crack that if they'd had cocaine they would have a chance at probation, they would be able to really take advantages of treatment and perhaps reconstruct their lives. But because they had crack, their lives were going to be basically over at a pretty young age, thrown away in a cell to have really no real opportunity, be in prison for 10, 5 years for what another person would get probation for. And this made it incredibly difficult to argue that our system of law was fair, that we believed in justice, that we thought it was right and just to treat people the same for doing the same thing.

The fact is, the chemical difference between crack and cocaine is the differences between water and ice. It is the same thing, and you cannot explain to a people that for doing the same thing that they should get 100-to-1 more severe treatment. It doesn't make sense.

So let me just commend people on both sides of the aisle for correcting this severely disproportionate and unfair anomaly in our law enforcement, and I take no blame for anybody. But I will say that there are thousands of people, literally thousands of people, who may get a real chance at life because of a mistake in their drug cases, because of this law.

Mr. SMITH of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to my friend and colleague from Texas (Mr. Paul).

(Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. PAUL. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this legislation. It's called the Fair Sentencing Act. I'd like to rename it, though. I'd like to call it the Slightly Fairer Resentencing Act, because it really makes an attempt to correct a very, very serious problem in equal justice in our systems, and that effort I think we should all applaud. I would have much preferred H.R. 3245. I was an original cosponsor of that along with Congressman Scott, but I think this is a typical example of trying to fix a problem that we invite upon ourselves.

In economics, I adhere to the position that once you want to do some good in the economy, with all the best motivations, we do things and we create new problems and we have to go back. If you get two new problems for every intervention, then you're constantly writing laws.

Well, in social policy, I believe the same thing. It was trying to improve social policy with crack cocaine. There was no evidence on this. It was designed to help people, especially the minorities that were using crack cocaine, and they thought this was terrible, and it turned out that its law backfired. It actually hurt minorities, didn't help them. Here we are trying to correct this disparity, and it just, to me, confirms the fact that government management, whether it is the economy or social policy, doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

When this country decided it was very dangerous to drink alcohol and we had to stop it, back in those days, in the teens of the last century, they decided in order for the government to do this they had to amend the Constitution. Can you imagine anybody being concerned today by what we do here and say we have to amend the Constitution? Oh, no. We amended the Constitution. It was a bomb. It made alcohol much more dangerous. All the drug dealers sold the alcohol, and the alcohol was more concentrated and less pure. People died. People woke up and they repealed it.

This is what's going to have to happen someday. We need to repeal the war on drugs.

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