@Bella…”There will always be a White America vs./and Black America with any President thats in office.” This is a very true statement. I used both the “vs.” and the “and.” The vs. signifies that there’s always gonna be whites and blacks at war for whatever reason. The “and” mean there will be two different neighborhoods/communities that exist in this world. However, I also recognize that not all blacks and whites are at war with each other.

I read about this in another article – the other article was not specific to the number of African Americans who could receive their freedom. It was hard to believe when I read it. Why would any president, not just Obama not free folks sentenced under what was admittedly a “bad law?” The fact that Congress felt it was necessary to redo the law speaks volumes about its unfaireness. Your facts reflect what was in the other article regarding the actions of the Obama justice department. For those who refuse to face the truth of this Administration’s actions, I have copied and pasted what that article stated, because it actually names name and gives case law.

“The Obama administration failed to take an innovative, aggressive, justice-seeking lead, either in putting forth the initial provisions of what eventually became the so-called Fair Sentencing Act, or negotiating its provisions in Congress before its eventual passage. With the administration doing all it could to avoid public identification with the measure, Congressional advocates were only able or willing to narrow the gap between crack and powdered cocaine possession penalties from 100 to 1 down to 18 to 1, even though the president’s party had a whopping majority in the House and a much thinner margin in the Senate. It wasn’t actually a great victory, but the White House was quick to take credit for it, and signed the measure into law in August of 2010.

The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 did not specify whether its reduction should apply retroactively to all those currently serving time for crack cocaine convictions, whether or not it applied to state or only federal prisoners, or just those sentenced since its passage, or even the exact date its provisions should begin to be enforced at all. The Obama administration not only failed to take advantage of its mandate to pursue justice for tens of thousands of families whose loved ones and potential caregivers and breadwinners were serving unjust and disproportionate sentences – it sent Eric Holder’s Justice Department into court to argue against retroactivity, against the reduction of sentences for inmates tried or sentenced since the law was passed, against its being applied to state prisoners, For all practical purposes, as Professor Douglas A. Berman of Ohio State University pointed out in October 2010,

“…President Obama’s Department of Justice has adopted the advocacy policy that the unfair and now reformed old crack sentencing statute should and must be applied for as long as possible to as many defendants as possible…”

For more than eleven months AFTER the passage of the so-called Fair Sentencing Act, the Obama Department of Justice went into courts again and again seeking to retain and expand the regime of mass incarceration, despite a torrent of appeals from advocacy organizations and the families of inmates across the country. Finally in July 2011, the Justice Department issued a memo to prosecutors declaring that only offenses committed after the August 3, 2010 signing date of the Fair Sentencing Act were eligible for sentencing reduction under its provisions.

Even the US Supreme Court told the Obama administration it was obligated to begin enforcement of the Fair Sentencing Act. But as the defense attorney Alec Karakatsanis put it in the Guardian (UK) last week,

“…the US supreme court held last year that the new, more “fair” sentences must be applied to those not yet sentenced.

But that case did not decide the fate of any of the thousands of people already sitting in prison because of what all agree is an unfair law. For those people – sentenced, in some cases, just days or weeks before the Fair Sentencing Act was signed – our society’s acknowledgment that they remain in prison for no good reason may not help them at all – because the government did not care to reduce their penalties retroactively when it declared them unjust.

For several years, federal judges have done nothing to remedy this injustice; one famously concluded that the prisoners sentenced under the old law had simply “lost on a temporal roll of the cosmic dice”. So, there are American citizens serving tens of thousands of years in prison because, according to all three branches of government, it’s just their tough luck?

Apparently so, until two months ago. On 17 May 2013, the US court of appeals for the sixth circuit held that the new, “fair” sentences must be applied to all those previously sentenced under laws that everyone acknowledges were discriminatory. The two-judge majority opinion wrote forcefully (pdf) and with unusual candor about the history of unequal treatment under the old laws. The judges ordered that those sentenced under those laws were entitled to ask federal judges to reduce their sentences…”

True to form, the Obama administration has already gone back to court to argue that the 6th Circuit was misguided in its directive to apply the Fair Sentencing Act. Ominously the White House is on track to appeal the 6th Circuit’s enforcement directive to the Supreme Court on technical grounds, which will likely rule that discriminatory impact is somehow NOT invidious and deliberate racial discrimination requiring any enforcement of any particular law. In other words, President Obama and Attorney General Holder, the most powerful pair of black officials in the country, are prepared keep tens of thousands of the prison state’s victims under hatches indefinitely. No matter their patter about how they were profiled back in the day. Their actions, not our expectations, and not their words, are who they are in the here and now.” by Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report.
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I LOVE our president, but come on now!