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- Title
The Discriminatory Purpose of the 1994 Crime Bill.
- Authors
Biale, Noam; Hinton, Elizabeth; Ross, Elizabeth
- Abstract
Harsh criminal sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s have received renewed attention through a confluence of two seemingly contradictory events: an awakening to racial justice concerns through protests against the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (among many others), and the election of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., who, as a senator, was one of the chief architects of policies that fueled mass incarceration and exacerbated racial disparity in the criminal legal system. Historians in particular have begun to study declassified documents and newly available archival evidence that provide critical insight into the behind-the-scenes deal-making and legislative intent that led to the crime control policies that emerged at the federal level since the 1960s. Specifically, historical research indicates that federal lawmakers were well aware of the racially disparate impact of mandatory minimum sentencing schemes and the death penalty, yet chose to double down on those policies and reject alternative proposals that would have made the application of criminal law more equitable. This new frontier of historical research is not merely of academic interest; it has important implications for constitutional scholars and defense attorneys who can draw on these findings to challenge criminal statutes under the Equal Protection Clause. This Article highlights the power of collaboration between historians and legal scholars and practitioners who wish to train this new historical analysis on the modes and means by which our criminal legal system reinforces racial inequality. We focus our approach through the lens of a relatively obscure provision of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which imposed a one-year mandatory minimum for distributing narcotics within 1,000 feet of a public housing project. We examine the barriers to challenging such a statute under the Equal Protection Clause based on current Supreme Court precedent and circuit caselaw. We suggest a jurisprudential avenue for renewed equal protection challenges, namely, supplying evidence that Congress adhered to particular policies with full knowledge of their discriminatory impact. We examine the disparate enforcement of the public housing provision and its discriminatory purpose, as informed by newly developed historical evidence about the 1994 Crime Bill. Finally, we consider the lessons criminal defense attorneys and policymakers may learn from our example. We argue that a nuanced understanding of the true history of the war on crime is essential if President Biden and those in his administration who played instrumental roles in creating these discriminatory policies are serious about responding to the demand from the streets to dismantle them.
- Subjects
CRIMINAL sentencing; BIDEN, Joe, 1942-; WAR crimes; CRIMINAL defense; DEFENSE attorneys
- Publication
Harvard Law & Policy Review, 2021, Vol 16, Issue 1, p115
- ISSN
1935-2077
- Publication type
Article