USSC schedules public hearing on crack amendment retroactivity
As noted on the US Sentencing Commission’s website, the “Commission has scheduled a public hearing for November 13, 2007 at Georgetown University Law Center … regarding whether Amendment 9 pertaining to offenses involving cocaine base (“crack”) and Amendment 12 pertaining to certain criminal history rules … should be applied retroactively to previously sentenced defendants.” This official notice provides a bit more background and details on the hearing.
This should be a very interesting hearing, in part because it deals with a very important issue: as this recent USSC analysis details, the Commission’s research “estimates that 19,500 offender sentenced between October 1, 1991 and June 30, 2007 … would be eligible to seek a reduce sentence if the Commission were to make the 2007 crack cocaine amendment retroactive.”
Some recent related posts on crack sentencing: