The compromise language would have reduced the sentencing disparity to 2.5–1, and would not have been retroactive. Reuters reported Friday that Senate negotiators had reached a potential compromise to appease Republicans. Its last hope was being jammed into the giant end-of-year spending bill.
The EQUAL Act passed the House by a wide, bipartisan margin last year, raising hopes that it might move relatively smoothly through the Senate, where it collected a bipartisan group of co-sponsors that included Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) and 11 Republicans.īut the bill never made it to the Senate floor. The EQUAL Act would have reduced the penalties for federal crack cocaine offenses to the same level as those for powder cocaine offenses, and it would have made those changes retroactive, meaning federal crack offenders currently serving prison sentences would be eligible to have their sentences reduced. In 2010 Congress passed a law reducing the sentencing ratio to 18–1, and advocates hoped to finally erase it once and for all this legislative session with the passage of the EQUAL Act. Those laws set the penalties for crack cocaine offenses at 100 times greater than equivalent powder cocaine offenses, which resulted in monstrously long and racially disparate sentences. A once-promising bipartisan bill to erase the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine failed to make it into a year-end omnibus spending bill winding through Congress, likely dooming efforts to pass crack cocaine sentencing reform for yet another legislative session.Ĭriminal justice advocates have been working for decades to roll back draconian crack cocaine laws passed by Congress in the 1980s.
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