“Attorney General Eric Holder, in his first public statement on how past crack-cocaine defendants should be handled since the Fair Sentencing Act was signed into law last August, last Wednesday said new reduced penalties for federal crack-cocaine offenses should be applied retroactively, setting up a clash over the potential release of thousands of drug offenders currently in prison.,” The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.
If the new guidelines are applied retroactively, 12,040 offenders sentenced between Oct. 1, 1991 and Sept. 30, 2010 would be eligible to seek reduced sentences, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission research the Journal article said.
A May 20th.Sentencing Commission memorandum "estimating the impact on offenders currently incarcerated in the federal prison system of portions of the amendment, if the Commission were to make all of the amendment, or those portions, retroactively applicable," chronicled the interval between the passage of theFair Sentencing Act and present. On April 28, 2011, the Commission submitted amendments to the sentencing guidelines and official commentary to Congress, which become effective on November 1, 2011, unless Congress acts objects. The amendments and the reasons for amendment subsequently were published in the Federal Register. See 76 FR 24960 (May 3, 2011). Public comment regarding whether Amendment 2, pertaining to drug offenses, should be included as an amendment that may be applied retroactively to previously sentenced defendants were due on or before June 2, 2011. A "reader-friendly" version of the Commission's Request for Comment on Retroactivity remains online at the Commission’s website.
Full Text of “Fair Sentencing Act” [Pub. L. No. 111–220, 124 Stat. 2372 (2010) ]
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