CRACK-COCAINE OFFENDERS' SENTENCES REDUCED UNDER NEW FEDERAL RULES

It's been five years since Kira Mackey was able to visit her brother
without going through security screening.

Five years since she could talk to him without someone in uniform
standing nearby.

But that changed Friday, when Mackey's brother, Mario, walked out of
federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, as one of hundreds of people
released nationwide in the past week after their federal sentences
for crack-cocaine offenses were reduced.

"I'm very excited," said Kira Mackey, a native of Denver now living
in Chicago. "There's not words to describe the feelings I have for
him to come home."

The sentence reductions came as part of an effort to bring
crack-cocaine penalties closer to those of powder cocaine. In the
late 1980s, when crack was closely linked with street violence,
lawmakers raised the penalties for even nonviolent crack offenses.
The disparity between crack- and powder-cocaine punishments grew so
wide that an offender had to possess 100 times more powder cocaine to
trigger the same kind of prison sentences that crack cocaine brought.

The disparity received extra scrutiny because people sentenced to
harsher crack-cocaine sentences were overwhelmingly black.

"Crack-cocaine sentences were widely understood to overstate the
seriousness of crack-cocaine offenses," said Mary Price, vice
president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which campaigned
for the sentencing changes. ". . . There was a great deal of injustice."

Congress last year passed the Fair Sentencing Act, bringing crack
sentences down to an 18-to-1 ratio with powder-cocaine sentences. The
U.S. Sentencing Commission then decided to apply those new rules
retroactively, making roughly 12,000 federal inmates eligible to
apply for sentencing reductions when the rules went into effect Nov.
1. Those who are eligible will have an average of three years shaved
off their sentences, Price said.

In Colorado, federal prosecutors and defense attorneys have so far
identified close to 30 inmates whose cases originated in the state
and are likely in line for sentence reductions, said Jeff Dorschner,
a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Denver.

Attorneys have filed motions for sentence reductions in close to 20
of those cases, said Raymond Moore, the federal public defender for
Colorado. And at least 15 of those motions have been approved - with
at least seven offenders being released from prison in the past week,
according to federal court records.

That is how Mario Mackey found himself at the front door of the Fort
Worth Federal Correctional Institution on Friday.

In 2006, Mackey was arrested in Denver and charged with possession
with intent to distribute more than 5 grams of crack cocaine and
possession of a handgun by a felon. He pleaded guilty and was
sentenced to nine years in prison.

A similar 2008 sentence-reduction measure dropped that to about seven
years. The federal public defender's office filed a motion for an
additional sentence reduction in October, and U.S. District Judge
William J. Martinez reduced Mackey's sentence to time served.

"We don't really know too much about it at all," Kira Mackey said of
the sentencing changes. "We're just happy he's coming home."