Sessions to review Obama-era policies on drug-crime sentencing - Washington Post

By Sari Horwitz,

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reviewing policy changes set in place by the Obama administration that eliminated harsh punishments for low-level drug crimes and could direct federal prosecutors to again charge drug offenders with crimes carrying the most severe penalties, according to U.S. officials.

The change, if adopted, would overturn a memo by then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that instructed prosecutors to avoid charging low-level defendants with drug offenses that would trigger severe mandatory minimum sentences. Only defendants who met certain criteria, such as not belonging to a large-scale drug trafficking organization, a gang or a cartel, qualified for consideration under Holder’s instructions.

If new charging instructions are implemented, it would mark the first significant move by the Trump administration to bring back the drug war’s toughest practices — methods that had fallen out of favor in recent years as critics pointed to damaging effects of mass incarceration.

[Read The Post’s series on the financial and human toll of the war on drugs]

“As the Attorney General has consistently said, we are reviewing all Department of Justice policies to focus on keeping Americans safe and will be issuing further guidance and support to our prosecutors executing this priority — including an updated memorandum on charging for all criminal cases,” said Ian Prior, a department spokesman.

Sessions has recently peppered his speeches to law enforcement groups throughout the country with tough-on-crime rhetoric and urged Justice Department lawyers to prosecute more drug and gun cases.

The attorney general is considering having his prosecutors bring the most severe charges against drug traffickers, whether they are low-level defendants or not, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Sessions also may allow prosecutors to use more “enhancements” to make sentences even longer. Under what’s referred to as “Section 851” of the Controlled Substances Act, defendants charged with a federal drug, firearm or immigration crime may face enhancements if they have previously been convicted of a felony drug offense.

Holder told his prosecutors four years ago that they should stop using enhancements except in certain cases — such as when the defendant was involved in the use or threat of violence — in an effort, he said, to make punishments more fairly fit the crime.

[How Jeff Sessions wants to bring back the war on drugs]

Holder’s changes came in August 2013 during a growing push among lawmakers and civil rights groups to roll back the strict charging and sentencing policies created in the 1980s and 1990s at the height of the war on drugs. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was one of the sponsors of bipartisan criminal-justice legislation that would have reduced some of the mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug crimes — a bill that Sessions opposed and helped derail.

“As a proponent of criminal justice reform, I continue to believe that ending mandatory minimum sentences will actually make it easier to focus on violent crimes which impact our communities,” Paul said in a statement.

The Holder memo was also supported by many of the U.S. attorneys in the Obama administration.

[Holder seeks to avert mandatory minimum sentences for some low-level drug offenders]

But some prosecutors across the country fought Holder’s broad effort to eliminate mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain drug offenders, saying it damaged their ability to build cases from the ground up against major drug organizations.

Holder, now a lawyer at Covington & Burling and chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, declined to comment.

But Holder’s former spokesman Matthew Miller said the Trump administration “couldn’t be making it more clear who it cares about and who it doesn’t.”

“If you are addicted to opiates, you’ll get White House attention and increased treatment options,” Miller said. “If you get picked up with crack in your pocket, you’ll get jail time and a mandatory minimum.”

Read more:

Sessions directs federal prosecutors to target the nation’s most violent offenders

Trump’s pick for attorney general is shadowed by race and history

Sessions orders Justice Department to review all police reform agreements

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