Delaware House Passes Mandatory Minimums Repeal — Former FBI Chief Backs Measure

DOVER Delaware’s House of Representatives backed a bill repealing the state’s mandatory minimum drug sentences last week by a 26-13 vote.

The Senate has yet to take up the measure, though it is expected to face a tough battle.

Police and prosecutors, including the state attorney general, say the House Bill 71 would tie the hands of law enforcement, preventing them from bargaining for information about drug trafficking.

Advocates, including defense attorneys and a local issue group Stand Up for What’s Right and Just (SURJ) counter that the bill restores the balance of power that currently is lopsided in favor of the prosecution.

Sponsored by Republican House Speaker Terry Spence, the bill, in essence, returns sentencing in the hands of judges on a case-by-case basis, say advocates.

SURJ is comprised of a number of prominent Delaware lawyers and jurists. Some include Edmund N. Carpenter II, retired Supreme Court Justice Joseph T. Walsh, and former Delaware Attorney General Charles M. Oberly III.

The seven-year-old organization is currently chaired by Greenville resident Louis J. Freeh, a former FBI director who served from 1993 to 2001.

In a letter, Freeh wrote that he backed the measure because the two decade law is ineffective.

“Drugs are cheaper, purer and more available than ever before, and America’s prison population has tripled to more than 2.1 million,” Freeh wrote.

He added that the difference between getting a minimum prison sentence for drug offenses in Delaware is one packet of artificial sweetener.

“Add one and an addict faces a long term of imprisonment,” he wrote.

The House bill, if passed, would reclassify drug trafficking crimes from Class B to Class C felonies.

This means that a person currently facing a two-to 25-year-sentence would instead face zero to 15 years in prison. In other words, an average offender facing a sentence of two-to five-years would then face zero to 2 1/2 years in jail.

Gov. Ruth Ann Minner said that she tentatively supports the House bill, specifically because of her state’s prison problem.

“One of the points that really wasn’t made was that our prisons are overcrowded and this might do something to help,” she said.

In the last 25 years, the Delaware prison population has quadrupled at the cost of $200 million a year, according to Freeh.