News like this is never good.
Black and Hispanic men are more likely to receive longer prison sentences than their white counterparts since the Supreme Court loosened federal sentencing rules, a government study has concluded.
The study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission reignited a long-running debate about whether federal judges need to be held to mandatory guidelines in order to stamp out what might appear to be inherent biases and dramatically disparate sentences.
The report analyzed sentences meted out since the January 2005 U.S. v. Booker decision gave federal judges much more sentencing discretion.
For years, legal experts have argued over the disparity in sentencing between black and white men. The commission found that the difference peaked in 1999 with blacks receiving 14 percent longer sentences. By 2002, however, the commission found no statistical difference.
After the Booker decision, "those differences appear to have been increasing steadily," with black men receiving sentences that were up to 10 percent longer than those imposed on whites, the commission said.
Using another method of analyzing the data, the study found black men received sentences that were 23 percent longer than white men’s.
Hispanic men, meanwhile, received sentences that were almost 7 percent longer than white men’s. Immigrants also got longer sentences than U.S. citizens did…
Inserted from <McClatchy DC>
In my opinion, justice demands fair sentencing.