Osler's Razor

About every ten years, I start on a new big project. That is, I'm struck by something way bigger than me that needs to be different, and decide to go after it. Usually, I have fellow travelers. Sometimes, I am on my own, trying to talk people into something.

In about 2001, that thing was the crack-powder disparity in the federal sentencing guidelines, under which those convicted of selling one gram of crack got the same sentence as those who sold 100 grams of powder cocaine. The ratio was senseless; it prioritized incapacitating those who were least important and culpable in the whole process of drug trafficking. Someone would bring huge amounts of powder cocaine into the country, someone else would wholesale and distribute it to major cities, in each city someone else might wholesale it into neighborhoods, and then another would sell it to street level dealers who would rock it up into crack and sell it. And who did we treat as the kingpin? The last guy in the chain. It solved no problem even as it created racial disparities and gross injustice.

So we fixed it. We won a few US Supreme Court cases in 2007 (Kimbrough) and then in 2009 (Spears) that declared that judges could reject the 100-1 ratio. And then in 2010 Congress changed the law and guidelines. We won that one, in a thousand little motions. I remember being up after midnight, writing a brief at my kitchen table, and being thrilled at what could happen, and what that could mean for people I will never meet.

Next, beginning in about 2011, I started to push the Obama administration to use clemency for narcotics defendants, and ended up working with a lot of remarkable people.  I wrote about it and even went on an epic rant at the White House. And that kind of worked, too, though not enough. And we continue that effort.

Now I have a new idea.