Does Sessions's Crack Compromise Offer Hope for Reform?
Jeff Sessions, the man slated to become the next U.S. attorney general, has a complicated history with the war on drugs. Just ask Stephanie Nodd. Though she was never caught with narcotics, police arrested her in 1990 for a minor role in a crack cocaine ring in Mobile, Alabama. Sessions was the U.S. attorney for the state’s Southern District back then, and his office prosecuted Nodd, a 23-year-old single mother and first-time offender, sentencing her to 30 years behind bars. Her four small children were left to grow up without her.
Some 20 years later, Sessions changed the course of Nodd’s life once again with a handshake in a locker room 1,000 miles away from Mobile. In March 2010, Sessions, then Alabama’s junior senator, along with fellow Republican Orrin Hatch, hashed out an impromptu agreement with Democrat Dick Durbin after encountering one another in
