“Perhaps the finest aspects of Eric Holder’s legacy are what he left to the criminal justice system,” says Jennifer Sargent, a visiting professor of creative writing, about Attorney General Eric H. Holder, whose resignation was announced September 25 by President Obama. “He spoke directly to the system’s sentencing inequities by urging prosecutors to refrain from targeting nonviolent drug offenders and low-level criminal offenders. His call for restraint in these types of prosecutions demonstrated a commitment to addressing a glaring and perpetual problem in the criminal justice system—that while criminal sentencing is, in theory, fact based, the sentencing reality for these types of offenses is hardly race blind.”
Professor Sargent is a former New Hampshire District Court judge and law professor at Vermont Law School.
