The trajectory of any possible reform to the criminal justice system became more clear on Tuesday afternoon, after the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee spoke about the issue on the floor of the Senate.
The influential Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) railed against a prior proposal on mandatory minimums with bipartisan support and a Feb. 17 New York Times editorial that lambasted his opposition to the bill, before noting his support for asset forfeiture reform, initiatives to improve public defenders’ offices, and more accurate criminal background databases.
“I want to let my colleagues know that I do believe that there are some inequities in the criminal justice system,” Grassley said. “The Judiciary Committee will be looking at ways to address that.”
The speech should shed more light on how potential criminal justice reform might look—an issue that has brought together well-connected influence peddlers on the right and left, driven to act by nationwide protests that erupted after a high profile incident in which a white police officer, Darren Wilson, killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo.
But while much of the focus of those demonstrations centered around drug laws, the ability of police to aggressively commit acts of violence with impunity, and statutes that mandate harsh sentences, Grassley is hoping to take the discourse in another direction. The War on Drugs and police accountability reform, per his speech, might not be taken head on during the 114th Congress.
Asset seizure, or civil forfeiture, was one issue the Judiciary Committee chair touched upon. He called it a useful tool for law enforcement, but said it has created “perverse incentives that have led to abuses.”
“Law enforcement can sometimes directly benefit from property that they seize, sometimes contrary to state law,” he remarked. “Those whose property is taken often do not have access to fair procedures or lawyers to help them get that property back. These processes and procedures need real structural reform.”
It has become a heated topic in recent years, brought to the fore in August 2013 by the New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman, in her critically-acclaimed piece, “Taken.” Stillman detailed how the practice has caused local criminal justice systems, in some jurisdictions, to metastasize into an oppressive, Kafkaesque regime.
In January, Attorney General Eric Holder revealed some changes to the Justice Department’s policies on forfeiture, but the effect and significance of those revisions have been debated.
Grassley also said he was concerned that “too many times in America, equality under the law is not a reality,” turning his attention to the network of public defenders offices that are more often than not stretched thin.
“The poor do not receive the same justice in many instances,” he noted.
“I regret to say that although I am aware of instances where the federal government is responsible, it is particularly at the state level where the Sixth Amendment is violated numerous times on a daily basis,” he said, referring to prior Supreme Court rulings on the right to a fair trial that, he said, are routinely flouted.
He brought up “the question of the competence of the counsel appointed,” and expressed a “fear that some innocent people are being sentenced to prison.”
Finally, Grassley said that Congress should examine how background checks are conducted, when “32 percent of adults in this country have criminal records that are contained in databases.”
“I do not want to see the arrest record turn up in a background check and deny someone the ability to work, deny the economy the benefit of our productivity, and deprive the government of tax revenue from that work because a background check turned up a record of an arrest from long ago that never resulted in conviction,” he said.
But before laying out his vision of the way forward, Grassley laid into his colleagues’ ideas, calling the Smarter Sentencing Act (SSA) misguided.
The bill–designed to cut mandatory minimum prison sentences imposed by the federal government on a number of criminal convictions–was drafted by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). It has co-sponsorship from eight of Lee’s colleagues on the judiciary committee spread across the ideological spectrum–from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to the ranking member, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).
The committee chair, however, accused his colleagues of supporting the measure in a bad faith debate, noting that it would cause federal spending to increase in the long-run because more Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would be afforded rights and benefits provided by the federal government.
He also remarked that Sentencing Commission statistics have shown that most mandatory minimums target drug traffickers–not drug users—and only when they have little or no criminal history. He claimed that SSA supporters are ignoring this information, and the existence of the “safety valve.”
“They do not argue that Obama Administration officials did not warn of the link of drug crimes to terrorism and national security threats,” Grassley said. “They don’t challenge the statistics from the Sentencing Commission or the existence of the safety valve or the effect of mandatory minimum sentences in enhancing prosecution of serious drug offenders. They won’t take on the CBO’s cost estimates. They do cite CBO’s discretionary cost savings of $3 billion, but in the long run, entitlement spending can be more costly because entitlement spending must be paid. They don’t do any of these because they can’t.”
Grassley also leveraged these points to rail against The New York Times, blasting its editorial board for attacking his positions on SSA, and a range of other bills on sentencing reduction. He said the paper was in an “Orwellian world” and part of the “leniency industrial complex.”
“Problems do exist in the criminal justice system. I plan to use the Judiciary Committee to address some important ones,” he said. “But rather than marking up ill-considered and dangerous legislation like the so-called Smarter Sentencing Act, we will take up bills that can achieve a large measure of consensus.”
