Likely Committee Vote on H.R. 4547 Today

Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) reports that it expects the full House Judiciary Committee to debate and vote on H.R. 4547 today, Thursday, September 30. Should H.R. 4547 become law, it not only sends a strong signal from Congress of which direction it will go in the post-Blakely and post-Booker & Fanfan sentencing world: the very wrong direction everyone other than DOJ strongly counsels. This bill continues the trajectory of adding terrible mandatory minimum sentences, and decreasing the discretion of judges, as well as largely gutting the safety valve, among other harmful effects.

I suppose that, like the President, Representatives Sensenbrenner and Feeney maintain they are just moving ahead steadily, never minding that it happens to be in the wrong direction.

FAMM has the following links for Letters of Opposition and Sign-On Letters (note: letters are in Adobe PDF format.)

- Judicial Conference of the United States
- United States Sentencing Commission
- American Bar Association
- Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), NAACP, FAMM, ACLU, National Council of La Raza, NACDL sign-on letter