Racial Challenge to Crack Laws Rejected

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a claim that stiff penalties for dealing crack cocaine amount to racial discrimination and refused to reconsider the 10-year prison term given an African American man whose first criminal offense was selling crack.

The action came as no surprise. It marks at least the third time in the last three years that the justices have turned away a race-bias challenge to the crack cocaine laws.

Nonetheless, prominent African Americans have continued to raise the issue. The latest appeal was signed by Los Angeles attorney Johnnie L. Cochran and Harvard Law Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr.

“There is a perception among African Americans that there is no more unequal treatment by the criminal justice system than in the crack vs. powder cocaine racially biased sentencing provision,” they said.

In 1986, after the cocaine overdose death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, Congress passed a new drug law that imposed a 10-year mandatory federal prison term on persons caught with at least 50 grams--roughly one-tenth of a pound--of crack cocaine. A seller of powder cocaine would have to get caught with 5,000 grams or more to get the same 10-year sentence.

Despite complaints from judges and penal experts, Congress and President Clinton have refused to consider changing the law on crack cocaine.

For its part, the Supreme Court has refused to strike down laws on grounds that they have a “disparate impact” on some groups.

The justices have drawn a distinction between laws intended to discriminate and those that have a discriminatory effect.

On the one hand, it is clearly unconstitutional for the government at any level to pass a law intended to single out a racial or ethnic group for punishment.

Similarly, it is unconstitutional for officials to enforce the law in a discriminatory manner. In a classic example, San Francisco officials were charged with violating the Constitution in 1886 because they regularly shut down Chinese-owned laundries for fire-code offenses but did not shut down white-owned laundries for the same offenses.

But laws are not unconstitutional, the court has said, simply because they are shown to have a harsher effect on some groups. In recent years, nearly 90% of those charged with federal crack cocaine charges have been black, the court has noted. But white men account for more than 90% of the federal convictions for crimes such as LSD dealing, obscenity and financial fraud, it said.

The latest case to raise the issue began in 1995, when Duane C. Edwards of the District of Columbia sold 126 grams of crack cocaine to an undercover U.S. Park Police officer. Edwards was convicted and given the mandatory 10-year term. He appealed.

“We have held [that] Congress had not acted with a discriminatory purpose in setting greater penalties for cocaine base [crack] crimes than for powder cocaine offenses,” wrote U.S. appeals court Judge Karen Henderson in rejecting his claim. Although this law may have a “disparate impact on black defendants,” it is not unconstitutional for that reason, she said.

Without comment, the Supreme Court rejected Edwards’ final appeal in the case (Edwards vs. U.S., 96-1492).