Supreme Court ruling on crack sentences 'a shocking loss,' drug reform advocates say

The court's ruling came over the objections of the law's authors, who said they intended to help those low-level offenders, and the Biden administration, whose Justice Department declined to argue for the narrow interpretation of the law in court."It's a shocking loss," said MiAngel Cody, lead counsel and justice policy analyst at the Decarceration Collective.Cody said she has represented a "kingpin" convicted of possessing thousands of kilos of crack who was released under the 2018 law, known as the First Step Act, which aimed to ease harsh drug sentencing statutes that has disproportionately punished Black people. She is also advocating for the Equal Act, which would eliminate the crack-to-powder cocaine sentencing disparity completely.In addition, her organization is urging the Biden administration to abandon a Trump Justice Department memo saying 24,000 nonviolent inmates released to home confinement to curb the spread of Covid-19 in prisons must be sent back to prison if their sentences haven't ended.Jacki Phelps, appellate litigation counsel at the Decarceration Collective, said she believed that the authors of the First Step Act hadn't made a mistake but that the Supreme Court had.The impact is hard to calculate, because there is no simple way to measure how many prisoners had their paths to potential early release cut off, Phelps said.Cody and Phelps pointed to one example, in addition to Terry: Jahmal Green, 45, who is serving a life sentence for a 2006 conviction for distributing less than a gram of crack in Iowa after earlier drug convictions.Green, who is Black, had withdrawn all of his pending court motions because he was hoping for a more favorable law to help him, said Cody, who has been following his case.