Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) found himself on Tuesday facing off with another high profile opponent of his stubborn resistance to sentencing reform, as the President’s Deputy Attorney General nominee praised legislation held up by Grassley in committee.
Sally Yates lauded the bill, citing her work experience as a US Attorney in Atlanta on a Justice Department pilot program.
“I believe that the Smarter Sentencing Act, if passed, will make our country much safer,” she noted at a hearing that was more about the Obama administration’s remaining Justice Department priorities than about the suitability of the nominee. Yates is currently serving as the acting Deputy Attorney General.
She specifically told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, that it would not impact federal prosecutors’ abilities to coerce defendants into cooperating with the government—an indirect refutation of an argument made earlier this month by Grassley.
Yates said since 2013, when the Justice Department’s “Smart on Crime” initiative gave prosecutors discretion to indict certain non-violent offenders on charges that carry no mandatory minimums, she saw no empirical evidence to suggest that defendants’ cooperation with prosecutors had subsequently decreased—at least not in the Northern District of Georgia. The US Attorney in Atlanta said she saw the percentage of defendants pleading guilty in drug cases actually increase by half a percentage point, while the ratio of defendants who cooperated with prosecutors remained the same.
“I wasn’t surprised by that because a defendant will always have an incentive to want to get a lower sentence,”she said.
The legislation has been a point of contention on the committee, but really only due to Grassley’s influence. A bipartisan coalition has faced off against the chair over the merits of the legislation.
Durbin–who cosponsored the bill with nine other senators, ranging from Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) to ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)–said Tuesday that the minimum sentencing regime has caused undue burdens on the criminal justice system and ultimately harmless people swept up in its dragnet.
“Particularly in the category of non-violent drug offenses, we’ve seen a dramatic increase,” he said Tuesday.
Durbin also noted that the Smarter Sentencing Act wouldn’t ban mandated sentence floors for convictions, but that it would narrow the type of offenses to which they can be applied.
In the months that followed the start of nationwide protests against the criminal justice system—demonstrations that started, in earnest, after a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. shot and killed an unarmed black teenager—Grassley’s opposition to relaxed mandatory minimums has become a national issue.
The New York Times described Grassley’s thoughts on the matter as being in defiance of “basic fairness and empirical data.”
“Mr. Grassley is as mistaken as he is powerful. Mandatory minimums have, in fact, been used to punish many lower-level offenders who were not their intended targets,” the paper said in a Feb. 17 editorial. “Meanwhile, the persistent fantasy that locking up more people leads to less crime continues to be debunked.”
Earlier this month, as The Sentinel reported, Grassley spoke on the Senate floor to hit out at both his colleagues and the Times editorial, calling them “Orwellian” and part of a “leniency industrial complex.”
The chair claimed that mandatory minimums are still useful for non-violent drug offenses, including the “importation, manufacture, and distribution of serious drugs like heroin, PCP, LSD, and meth,” and suggested that broader post-Ferguson reform efforts should pivot around the relaxation of civil forfeiture rules, the equipping of under-resourced public defenders’ offices, and the improving of criminal background databases.
“It would harm the ability of prosecutors to obtain cooperation from lower level offenders to obtain intelligence regarding terrorists’ planned attacks,” the chair claimed during his March 10 speech.
But while Grassley was not present at the hearing when Durbin and Yates addressed this point, he was told by the witness that the incumbent system of mandatory minimums is counterproductive.
“Senator, I believe that mandatory minimum sentences are an important tool for prosecutors, but I also think that we have an obligation to use that tool as effectively and as efficiently as possible,” she said.
“The Bureau of Prisons now takes up almost two-thirds of the department’s budget,” Yates also told Grassley. “That’s really untenable and unsustainable.”
