{"id":7338,"date":"2017-04-11T02:47:53","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T02:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.denverpost.com?p=2610645&amp;preview_id=2610645"},"modified":"2017-04-11T02:47:53","modified_gmt":"2017-04-11T02:47:53","slug":"sessions-right-hand-man-steven-cook-thinks-holder-doj-was-soft-on-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/sessions-right-hand-man-steven-cook-thinks-holder-doj-was-soft-on-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"Sessions\u2019 right-hand man, Steven Cook, thinks Holder DOJ was \u201csoft on crime\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0 5px 5px;float:right;height:100px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/sessions-right-hand-man-steven-cook-thinks-holder-doj-was-soft-on-crime\/\" send=\"true\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"like\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div><div class=\"row\" id=\"sticky-outer\">\n<div class=\"large-11 small-12 columns\">\n<div class=\"entry-meta-date\">Published: Apr 10, 2017, 9:39 am \u2022 Updated: Apr 10, 2017, 9:39 am<span class=\"single-comments-link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/04\/10\/steven-cook-justice-system-prison-reform\/76949\/#disqus_thread\" class=\"commentsNameLink\" \/><\/span><\/div>\n<p class=\"byline\">By <strong>Sari Horwitz<\/strong>, <em> The Washington Post<\/em><\/p>\n<p>When the Obama administration launched a sweeping policy to reduce harsh prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, rave reviews came from across the political spectrum. Civil rights groups and the Koch brothers praised Obama for his efforts, saying he was making the criminal justice system more humane.<\/p>\n<p>But there was one person who watched these developments with some horror. Steven Cook, a former street cop who became a federal prosecutor based in Knoxville, Tennessee, saw nothing wrong with how the system worked \u2013 not the life sentences for drug charges, not the huge <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/02\/27\/sessions-new-drug-policies-could-increase-prison-totals\/74421\/\">growth of the prison population<\/a>. And he went everywhere \u2013 Bill O\u2019Reilly\u2019s show on Fox News, congressional hearings, public panels \u2013 to spread a different gospel.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe federal criminal justice system simply is not broken. In fact, it\u2019s working exactly as designed,\u201d Cook said at a criminal justice panel at The Washington Post last year.<\/p>\n<p>The Obama administration largely ignored Cook, who was then president of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys. But he won\u2019t be overlooked anymore.<\/p>\n<p>Attorney General Jeff Sessions has brought Cook into his inner circle at the Justice Department, appointing him to be one of his top lieutenants to help undo the criminal justice policies of Obama and former attorney general Eric Holder Jr. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/03\/15\/jeff-sessions-marijuana-federal-law-enforcement-opioids\/75602\/\">As Sessions has traveled to different cities to preach his tough-on-crime philosophy<\/a>, Cook has been at his side.<\/p>\n<p>Sessions has yet to announce specific policy changes, but Cook\u2019s new perch speaks volumes about where the Justice Department is headed.<\/p>\n<p>Law enforcement officials say that Sessions and Cook are preparing a plan to prosecute more drug and gun cases and pursue mandatory minimum sentences. The two men are eager to bring back the national crime strategy of the 1980s and \u201990s from the peak of the drug war, an approach that had fallen out of favor in recent years as minority communities grappled with the effects of mass incarceration.<\/p>\n<p>Crime is near historic lows in the United States, but Sessions says that the spike in homicides in several cities, including Chicago, is a harbinger of a \u201cdangerous new trend\u201d in America that requires a tough response.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs is bad,\u201d Sessions said to law enforcement officials <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/02\/28\/jeff-sessions-marijuana-legalization-to-nations-ags\/74535\/\">in a speech in Richmond last month<\/a>. \u201cIt will destroy your life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Advocates of criminal justice reform argue that Sessions and Cook are going in the wrong direction \u2013 back to a strategy that tore apart families and sent low-level drug offenders, disproportionately minority citizens, to prison for long sentences.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey are throwing decades of improved techniques and technologies out the window in favor of a failed approach,\u201d said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM).<\/p>\n<p>But Cook, whose views are supported by other federal prosecutors, sees himself as a dedicated assistant U.S. attorney who for years has tried to protect neighborhoods ravaged by crime. He has called FAMM and organizations like it \u201canti-law enforcement groups.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The records of Cook and Sessions show that while others have grown eager in recent years to rework the criminal justice system, they have repeatedly fought to keep its toughest edges, including winning a battle in Congress last year to defeat a reform bill.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf hard-line means that my focus is on protecting communities from violent felons and drug traffickers, then I\u2019m guilty,\u201d Cook said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s hard-line. I think that\u2019s exactly what the American people expect of their Department of Justice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When asked for a case that he was proud to work on during his three-decade career as a prosecutor, Cook points to when his office went after a crack ring operating in Chattanooga housing projects between 1989 and 1991.<\/p>\n<p>This was during the height of the crack epidemic and the drug war. After the cocaine overdose of black basketball star Len Bias in 1986, Congress began passing \u201ctough on crime\u201d laws, including mandatory minimum sentences on certain drug and gun offenses. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed one of the toughest-ever crime bills, which included a \u201cthree strikes\u201d provision that gave mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders.<\/p>\n<p>Federal prosecutors such as Cook applauded their \u201cnew tools\u201d to get criminals off the street.<\/p>\n<p>Cook said last year: \u201cWhat we did, beginning in 1985, is put these laws to work. We started filling federal prisons with the worst of the worst. And what happened next is exactly what Congress said they wanted to happen \u2013 and that is violent crime began in 1991 to turn around. By 2014, we had cut it in half.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To bring down the Chattanooga drug ring\u2019s leader, Victor Novene, undercover federal agents purchased crack from Novene\u2019s underlings. Prosecutors then threatened them with long prison sentences to \u201cflip\u201d them to give up information about their superiors.<\/p>\n<p>Cook said in March: \u201cWe made buys from individuals who were lower in the organization. We used the mandatory minimums to pressure them to cooperate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cook\u2019s office also added gun charges to make sentences even longer, another popular tool among prosecutors seeking the longest possible punishments.<\/p>\n<p>With the mandatory minimum sentences and firearms \u201cenhancements,\u201d Novene received six life sentences. Many of his lieutenants were sentenced to between 16 and 33 years in federal prison.<\/p>\n<p>But sentencing reform advocates say the tough crime policies went too far. The nation began incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other country \u2013 jailing 25 percent of the world\u2019s prisoners at a cost of $80 billion a year. The nation\u2019s prison and jail population more than quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million in 2015, filled with mostly black men strapped with lengthy prison sentences \u2013 10 or 20 years, sometimes life without parole for a first drug offense.<\/p>\n<p>Obama, the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, launched an ambitious clemency initiative to release certain drug offenders from prison early. And Holder told his prosecutors, in an effort to make punishments more fairly fit the crime, to stop charging low-level nonviolent drug offenders with offenses that imposed severe mandatory sentences. He called his strategy, outlined in an August 2013 report, \u201cSmart on Crime.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cook has called it \u201cSoft on Crime\u201d and said the Chattanooga case would have been much more difficult to make, \u201cif possible at all,\u201d in recent years.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were discouraged from using mandatory minimums,\u201d Cook said about Holder\u2019s 2013 charging and sentencing memo to prosecutors. \u201cThe charging memo handcuffed prosecutors. And it limited when enhancements can be used to increase penalties, an important leverage when you\u2019re dealing with a career offender in getting them to cooperate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cook has also dismissed the idea that there is such a thing as a nonviolent drug offender.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDrug trafficking is inherently violent. Drug traffickers are dealing in a heavy cash business,\u201d he said on the \u201cO\u2019Reilly Factor\u201d last year. \u201cThey can\u2019t resolve disputes in court. They resolve the disputes on the street, and they resolve them through violence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Story continues below video<\/em><br \/>Watch Cook speak on criminal justice reform: \u201cCrime spiraling up\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cook and Sessions have also fought the winds of change on Capitol Hill, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers recently tried but failed to pass the first significant bill on criminal justice reform in decades.<\/p>\n<p>The legislation, which had 37 sponsors in the Senate, including Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, and 79 members of the House, would have reduced some of the long mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug crimes. It also would have given judges more flexibility in drug sentencing and made retroactive the law that reduced the large disparity between sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine.<\/p>\n<p>The bill, introduced in 2015, had support from outside groups as diverse as the Koch brothers and the NAACP. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., supported it, as well.<\/p>\n<p>But then people such as Sessions and Cook spoke up. The longtime Republican senator from Alabama became a leading opponent, citing the spike in crime in several cities.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cViolent crime and murders have increased across the country at almost alarming rates in some areas. Drug use and overdoses are occurring and dramatically increasing,\u201d said Sessions, one of five members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted against the legislation. \u201cIt is against this backdrop that we are considering a bill . . . to cut prison sentences for drug traffickers and even other violent criminals, including those currently in federal prison.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cook testified that it was the \u201cwrong time to weaken the last tools available to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After GOP lawmakers became nervous about passing legislation that might seem soft on crime, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSessions was the main reason that bill didn\u2019t pass,\u201d said Inimai Chettiar, the director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. \u201cHe came in at the last minute and really torpedoed the bipartisan effort.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now that he is attorney general, Sessions has signaled a new direction. As his first step, Sessions told his prosecutors in a memo last month to begin using \u201cevery tool we have\u201d \u2013 language that evoked the strategy from the drug war of loading up charges to lengthen sentences.<\/p>\n<p>And he quickly appointed Cook to be a senior official on the attorney general\u2019s task force on crime reduction and public safety, which was created following a Trump executive order to address what the president has called \u201cAmerican carnage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf there was a flickering candle of hope that remained for sentencing reform, Cook\u2019s appointment was a fire hose,\u201d said Ring, of FAMM. \u201cThere simply aren\u2019t enough backhoes to build all the prisons it would take to realize Steve Cook\u2019s vision for America.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sessions is also expected to take a harder line on the punishment for using and distributing marijuana, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2016\/11\/28\/jeff-sessions-moderate-marijuana-approach\/68286\/\">a drug he has long abhorred<\/a>. His crime task force will review existing marijuana policy, according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/04\/07\/jeff-sessions-marijuana-justice-department-policies\/76857\/\">a memo he wrote prosecutors this week<\/a>. Using or distributing marijuana is illegal under federal law, which classifies it as a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/04\/07\/marijuana-federal-rescheduling-schedule-i\/76885\/\">Schedule 1 drug<\/a>, the same category as heroin, and considered more dangerous than cocaine and methamphetamine.<\/p>\n<p>In his effort to resurrect the practices of the drug war, it is still unclear what Sessions will do about the wave of states that have legalized marijuana in recent years. Eight states and the District of Columbia now permit the recreational use of marijuana, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/03\/15\/medical-marijuana-map-state-laws-2017-grades-asa\/75472\/\">28 states and the District have legalized the use of medical marijuana<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/03\/23\/federal-marijuana-trump-administration-tough-talk-jeff-sessions\/76000\/\">rhetoric against weed seems to get stronger with each speech<\/a>. In Richmond, he cast doubt on the use of medical marijuana and said it \u201chas been hyped, maybe too much.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sessions\u2019s aides stress that the attorney general does not want to completely upend every aspect of criminal justice policy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are not just sweeping away everything that has come before us.\u201d said Robyn Thiemann, the deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy, who is working with Cook and has been at the Justice Department for nearly 20 years. \u201cThe attorney general recognizes that there is good work out there.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Still, Sessions\u2019s remarks on the road reveal his continued fascination with an earlier era of crime fighting.<\/p>\n<p>In the speech in Richmond, he said, \u201cPsychologically, politically, morally, we need to say \u2013 as Nancy Reagan said \u2013 \u2018<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecannabist.co\/2017\/03\/23\/federal-marijuana-trump-administration-tough-talk-jeff-sessions\/76000\/\">Just say no.<\/a>\u2018 \u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><!-- .row --> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Attorney General Jeff Sessions has brought Cook into the Justice Department to help undo the criminal justice policies of Obama and former AG Eric Holder Jr. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6811,371,7066,6964,6813,77,5667,56,9,6855,5019,441,1,3,61,1736],"tags":[6816,2949,7067,6967,6818,2655,5673,2636,6856,5022,3015],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7338"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}