Viginia is (not) for (crack) lovers

This new article from US News & World Report, headlined “Releasing Crack Convicts Early: The first batch of convicted crack cocaine dealers will getting out this year, and Virginia will feel the brunt,” spotlights the local quality of the (purportedly uniform) federal sentencing system.  Here are snippets:

[N]o place in the country will feel the impact of the [crack guideline] changes more than the Eastern District of Virginia, which has 7 percent — 1,404 cases — of the nation’s 19,500 individuals impacted by the new guidelines.  That is nearly double the amount in the next highest areas, the middle district of Florida and the district of South Carolina.

How this stretch of Virginia, which runs from the border of Washington, D.C., through Richmond and Norfolk, came to host more most federal crack cocaine cases than any other district has little to do with the prevalence of drug trafficking. Rather, the disproportionate share of affected individuals serves as an example of how the politics of criminal justice is always local….

Frustrated that local prosecutors treated crack cases as only misdemeanors, the U.S. Attorney’s office began working with local law enforcement to prosecute them on the federal level, where mandatory minimum sentences make jail time much longer…. The choice to prosecute under federal law angered some federal judges and defense attorneys who felt smaller dealers overburdened the federal system….

The result was soon clear. By 1993, the Eastern District of Virginia had the fourth-highest number of crack cocaine cases in the nation, then 114….  It’s a pattern hardly unchanged to this day.  In 2006, the Eastern District of Virginia topped the nation in crack cocaine prosecutions with 253 — a sign that crack dealers will continue to face heavy enforcement in the region.  And Chuck Rosenberg, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia has no regrets. “It’s a federal crime, so I don’t apologize for prosecuting it.”