Scholarly Writing
Spade was an early advocate for the abolition of the so-called "100:1 ratio" which punished criminal defendants convicted of crack cocaine offenses much more harshly than those convicted of powder cocaine offenses. The disparate treatment effected by this law was particularly egregious because the result was to punish African-American defendants more harshly than white defendants. Spade's Aizona Law Review article advocating a decrease in the 100:1 ratio was cited in the testimony before the United States Sentencing Commission of Irwin H. Schwartz, President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) in which Schwartz urged a reform of the cocaine sentencing laws. Eleven years later, Spade was proven correct when the United States Supreme Court held that federal courts were not constrained to impose the 100:1 ratio when sentencing defendants in crack cocaine cases if they found that the sentence was greater than necessary to achieve the purposes of sentencing. Spade's article was cited in the Amicus Curiae Brief of the NAACP's Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. filed with the Supreme Court in the Kimbrough case.
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