Word: cracking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...satire. At the center of the story is S.O. Letterman, a movie producer who starts off high-minded and ends with his eye on the box office. Letterman does not give a rat's rump for historical truth. Tim Curtiz, a London-based journalist taking a crack at a lucrative script-writing assignment, does. The subject of the movie, called Masai Dreams, is a striking French anthropologist named Claudia Cohn-Casson, whose work among the Masai, and whose fate at the hands of the Nazis, illustrate the collapse of the 20th century's grandest assumptions about reason and scientific objectivity...
...criminal consequences. Under federal law, if you are caught with 5 grams of crack, you will, at minimum, be slapped with a five-year penalty. You must be caught with at least 500 grams of powder cocaine to earn a comparable sentence. Whether intended or not, the effect of this 100-to-1 ratio is that "it punishes poor people and people of color more heavily,'' says Nkechi Taifa of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...page report released in February, the U.S. Sentencing Commission deplored this disparity, noting that blacks account for 88.3% of all federal crack distribution convictions, but just 27.4% of cocaine trafficking convictions. On average, crack defendants receive prison sentences three to eight times as long as their cocaine counterparts for comparable amounts. Willie Aikens, a former first baseman for the Kansas City Royals, is a case in point. Convicted last year of selling 50 grams of crack, he is now doing 15 years in the federal prison at Leavenworth; had he sold cocaine instead, his sentence would be closer...
...disparate sentences were Congress's hasty answer to the drug panic that swept America in 1986, following the rapid spread of crack sales through major urban areas. Ironically, it was the cocaine death that summer of Len Bias, a promising basketball player who had recently been drafted by the Boston Celtics, that propelled Congress to act. Then Speaker Tip O'Neill, his ears ringing from the outcry of his Cambridge constituents, pressed House committees for swift antidrug legislation. "We didn't have hearings on this, which is really extraordinary," says Eric Sterling, then counsel to the House Judiciary Committee...
...April the Sentencing Commission, by a 4 to 3 vote, recommended that base sentences for crack and cocaine be equalized. Even so, the playing field would not be entirely leveled. Under the proposed guidelines, drug sales involving weapons, violence or perpetrators who have significant criminal records would receive stiffer sentences. Thus, the Commission notes, "crack offenders will receive sentences generally at least twice as long as those for powder cocaine offenders involved with the same amount of drugs...