On the Supreme Court docket: Fairness, textualism, and crack cocaine
It was 2008, and coming off his second run-in with the law, Tarahrick Terry wanted to make some money.
A week shy of his 21st birthday, he had four grams of crack cocaine in his pocket – something of an early present. But two undercover Miami cops ensured he couldn’t cash in.
He pleaded guilty and asked the judge for forgiveness. The judge sentenced him to 188 months in federal prison, and Mr. Terry’s been there ever since.
If he’d had four grams of powder cocaine, he could have been released by now. But Mr. Terry’s punishment followed war-on-drugs-era federal guidelines that treated a gram of crack cocaine 100 times worse than a gram of powder cocaine.
The sentencing disparity has come to be viewed, by critics spanning the political spectrum, as one of the great injustices of the war on drugs. It’s been one of the key drivers
Regret and redemptionDueling definitions of textualismA question of equal justice