WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court decided Monday that judges may impose lighter sentences for crack cocaine, adding its voice to a racially sensitive debate over federal guidelines that call for tougher penalties for crack than for powder cocaine.
The crack cocaine decision was one of two Monday in which the justices, with identical seven-member majorities, reinforced their view that federal sentencing guidelines are advisory rather than mandatory, and that judges may deviate from them so long as their decisions are reasonable.
In the crack case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it was reasonable for a federal judge in Virginia to impose a lower sentence than one prescribed by the guidelines because of his disagreement with the rule that imposed the same sentence for a crack dealer as for someone selling 100 times as much powder cocaine.
Derrick Kimbrough was given a 15-year sentence, even though federal sentencing guidelines called for 19 to 22 years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said the law did not allow the judge to make such a determination.
But Ginsburg wrote that “the cocaine guidelines, like all other guidelines, are advisory only” and that the “the court of appeals erred in holding the crack/powder disparity effectively mandatory.”
The disparity has been challenged by civil rights groups because crack is overwhelmingly most often used by blacks, powder cocaine by whites, thus subjecting blacks to the tougher penalties. The court’s decision did not touch on that argument.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission this year adopted guidelines, which went into effect last month, that substantially lessen the disparity, and it is scheduled to vote today on whether nearly 20,000 prisoners sentenced under the old guidelines should be eligible to ask courts to cut their sentences.
The court also agreed that a judge was within his rights to impose a light sentence for a man convicted of conspiracy to sell 10,000 pills of the drug ecstasy.
The guidelines said that the man, Brian Gall, should be sentenced to at least 30 months in jail. But a federal judge in Iowa said Gall had quit the drug business years before authorities had found evidence of his involvement and had turned his life around. The judge sentenced him to probation.
The government appealed the sentence, and an appeals court agreed that the sentence was out of line. The Supreme Court reversed that decision, saying the judge had not abused his discretion to decide the proper sentence in an individual case.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. dissented in both cases.
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