Witnesses at International Human Rights Hearing Say Mandatory Minimums Are Racially Discriminatory
Feature Story by Tyler Lewis - 3/24/2006
Criminal justice experts are urging the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (ICHR), one of the two bodies of the inter-American system that addresses the promotion and protection of human rights in the Americas, to determine whether the racially discriminatory impact of U.S. mandatory minimum sentences violate international human rights laws.
At an ICHR hearing held on March 3, the Justice Roundtable, a broad network of criminal justice organizations, declared "that mandatory minimum sentences violate protected rights found in the American Declaration."
The American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man is the world's first international human rights resolution and establishes basic civil and political rights and corresponding duties for citizens of the signatory nations.
The ICHR considers the American Declaration to be a binding obligation for members of the Organization of American States, an international organization that includes the United States as a member.
Justice Roundtable requested the hearing in late December, claiming that the mandatory minimums violate specific human rights principles in the American Declaration, including the right to equal protection of the law, the right to a fair trial, and the right to judicial protection against violations of fundamental rights.
Witnesses at the hearing, which included members of Congress, representatives from Justice Roundtable, and Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), testified about the discriminatory impact of mandatory minimum sentencing on minorities, arguing that the laws defeat their original purpose of reforming disparate sentencing.
Many of the mandatory minimums enacted in the last 20 years were aimed at drugs and violent crime. Witnesses said the federal crack cocaine law, commonly referred to as the "100:1 quantity ratio," is one of the worst instances of mandatory minimums' discriminatory impact.
Under current cocaine laws, it takes 100 times more powder cocaine than crack cocaine to receive the same mandatory minimum penalty, despite recent studies that have proven no difference in the properties of powder cocaine and crack cocaine. Crack cocaine is used by poor African Americans because it is relatively inexpensive, whereas powder cocaine is predominantly used by whites.
African Americans made up more than 80 percent of the people sentenced under the federal crack cocaine law in 2002, according to Justice Roundtable. They also served substantially longer sentences than did whites.
"Much of this discrepancy can be traced to discriminatory practices such as racial profiling," said LCCR's Henderson. "The assumption that minorities are more likely to commit drug crimes and that most minorities commit such crimes prompts more minority arrests. Whites commit drug crimes too, but police enforcement tactics do not focus on them."
The Sentencing Commission, an outgrowth of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1980, the law that sparked a wave of mandatory minimums in the late 1980s, recommended the elimination of the cocaine laws three times in the 1990s, but this recommendation has never been carried out.
While current interpretations of U.S. anti-discrimination law require proof of discriminatory intent, Justice Roundtable argued that discriminatory intent should be inferred from the disproportionate impact of mandatory minimums.
Justice Roundtable recommended ICHR investigate mandatory minimums and provide the U.S. government with a legal analysis of any findings and guidelines for compliance with the American Declaration should a violation of the resolution be determined.
