A measure to alleviate overcrowded jails and lower sentences for certain non-violent drug offenders was approved Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee.
In a voice vote, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers on the panel endorsed the Sentencing Reform Act of 2015, which would lower certain mandatory minimums for drug offenses.
The law would reduce the penalty for so-called “third strike” drug offenders from life in prison to 25 years. The punishment for second-strike offenders would be lessened, from 20 years to 15 years.
“The Sentencing Reform Act makes commonsense changes to federal sentencing laws to ensure our federal laws effectively and appropriately punish wrongdoers, work as efficiently and fairly as possible, and do not waste taxpayer dollars,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said in a statement.
The measure would also grant judges more discretion to sentence offenders to terms below the prescribed minimum.
Additionally, certain provision would apply retroactively to the currently-imprisoned, with an exception for serious violent criminals.
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the committee’s ranking member said the legislation would ”save money by reducing the spending associated with needlessly long incarceration.” He added that it contains “a number of improvements to federal sentencing, any one of which would be considered a significant achievement standing alone.”
Conyers acknowledged in his opening statement, however, that the measure “does not achieve all of what I and many of my colleagues would want.”
A companion sentencing reform bill was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, following several months of wavering by Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). As momentum built behind aggressive criminal justice reform, Grassley blasted a New York Times editorial describing him as an obstruction, declaring the paper and reformists to be part of a “leniency industrial complex.”
One anti-Drug War advocate called House panel’s vote “historic.”
“We have a bill moving in the Senate, and now we have a companion bill moving in the House, so I’m optimistic we’ll have legislation on the President’s desk in a matter of months,” Drug Policy Alliance deputy director Michael Collins said.
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee also approved of a series of other bills that it claimed addresses “federal over-criminalization.”
“Over the past few decades, the federal criminal code ha s expanded dramatically,” Reps. Goodlatte and Conyers said in a joint statement.
The pair said that the legislation would “require that a person must intend to commit a crime in order to be criminally liable for that crime.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) was hoping to get a provision on the matter, known in the legal world as mens rea (Latin: “guilty mind”), in the package passed in October by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
