Representative
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

RE: Prevent further injustice by opposing H.R. 1528

Dear Representative ,

I strongly urge you to oppose and do everything you can to ensure the defeat of H.R. 1528, the Defending America's Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005. This bill would create a terrible travesty of justice and would weaken our society, NOT make it safer.

H.R. 1528 essentially creates a mandatory minimum for EVERY federal crime. The bill also increases penalties for many non-violent drug offenses, and creates new crimes, such as a mandatory 2-year prison term for any college student that suspects someone is selling marijuana on a college campus and fails to report it to the police within 24 hours. The legislation also makes it a federal crime in many instances to distribute sterile syringes to reduce the spread of AIDS and hepatitis.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission, the American Bar Association, each of the 11 Federal Judicial Circuits, Supreme Court Justices such as Justice Kennedy, and innumerable legal scholars widely agree that mandatory minimums fail to deter crime and make a travesty of justice. Additionally, mandatory minimums generate glaring racial disparities in our justice system and contribute greatly to prison overcrowding.

Mandatory minimums take discretion away from judges and place it solely in the hands of prosecutors who lack the experience and neutrality of judges. In an environment where prisons become a catch-all solution for social problems, this practice quickly becomes unsustainable and unjust. The Supreme Court's January Booker/Fanfan decision that federal judges are not required to adhere to harsh sentencing guidelines created an opportunity to redress this injustice.

Instead, HR 1528 perpetuates injustice by making the sentencing guidelines essentially mandatory, and creating new mandatory minimums that erode judicial discretion and harm families. For instance, its expansion of what is considered a "drug-free" zone will ensure that African-Americans and Latinos continue to get harsh mandatory minimums sentences while whites that commit the same offenses in rural and suburban areas get far less time.

Both on the federal level and in many state systems, the intended target of initial mandatory minimum sentence legislation was drug "king pins," but the actual impact of this sentencing practice has missed its target group almost entirely. For instance, the U.S. Sentencing Commission asserts that only 5.5% of all federal crack cocaine defendants and 11% of federal drug defendants are high-level drug dealers, while over 55% are low-level offenders.

H.R. 1528 is so bad that it cannot be fixed. I urge you to oppose it in its entirety.