Political Quotes

“Madam Chair, this is a very logical amendment that I hope will be accepted. What this does is it takes a program that the Department of Justice announced last week, that I have been encouraging the President and the Attorney General to engage in, and that is to expand the clemency department in the Department of Justice, so that individuals who are unjustly incarcerated can appropriately be recommended to the President for commutations and/or pardons. This Congress passed the fairness in sentencing law a few years ago. The President signed it in 2010, and it corrected what we found were errors in the judgment of this Congress in the way it incarcerated people and the distinctions of cocaine and crack and found that it had a disparate impact and an illogical impact on African Americans, that cocaine and crack are basically the same drug. For years, it was a 100 to 1 ratio in the quantity, working against what was considered a drug more likely to be used by African Americans than Caucasians. The fact is that each drug is equal in its pernicious effects on society, and that 100 to 1 ratio was wrong. We changed it to 18 to 1. It should be equal, but we changed it to 18 to 1. Accordingly, for the first time probably in the history of this body and maybe any legislative body, sentences were reduced, which means that the public policy of the United States of America is now that those people are being unjustly incarcerated.…”