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Student note about retroactive application of 2007 guideline crack amendments

By Douglas A. Berman

I just saw via SSRN this notable new student note forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, which is titled "Falling Through the Crack: How Courts Have Struggled to Apply the Crack Amendment to 'Nominal Career' and 'Plea Bargain' Defendants."  Here is the abstract: In 2007, after a decade of debate, the Federal Sentencing Commission instituted an amendment that decreased the sentences of some defendants who had been convicted of offenses involving crack cocaine.  A few months later, the Sentencing Commission passed another amendment that rendered this decrease in sentence retroactive.  Nearly three years after the passage and retroactive application of the Crack Amendment, however, two separate circuit splits have emerged as courts have struggled to uniformly interpret and apply the Sentencing Commission?s directives...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on November 24, 2010 (boomark / email).