New Sentencing Commission guidelines will give them a chance for compassionate release. But DOJ threatens to stand in the way.
As advocates representing poor people convicted of federal crimes, the overwhelming majority of whom are Black and Brown men, we have seen the ease with which harsh mandatory minimum sentences have become part of our criminal system.
For example, in 2008 at a federal courthouse in Fort Wayne, Indiana, our client Dion Walker received a mandatory life sentence for selling cocaine to a government informant. Because Walker had two prior convictions for nonviolent drug offenses, the judge had no choice but to sentence him to life in prison.
Highly controversial, this “three strikes” law represents the darkest excesses of our “tough on crime” approach to federal drug offenses.
Nonetheless, we have also seen modest progress toward reform. In 2018, Congress passed the First Step Act, which modified drug laws such that if Walker were sentenced today, his mandatory minimum would be 15 years, rather than life.
As reforms often are, however, the First Step Act was imperfect: Congress did not make its changes retroactive, meaning Walker continues to languish in prison for a sentence Congress overwhelmingly recognized as unjustifiably long.