Charging ahead – Armstrong vs. the United States

Prosecution discretion had problems where prosecutors were extremely powerful, unfair, and discriminatory at times. Looking at Christopher Armstrong's case, his lawyers applied the Supremes' court case of 1986 of Yick Wo V. Hopkins as a way of arguing that racial discrimination existed in the enforcement of crack offenses. The lawyers assigned the case of Christopher noted that every single crack defendant was black, and there was no white man involved in any case over three years.

This was disturbing as they found no white defendant having been charged despite them getting involved in crimes. They believed that most white defendants were sent from the federal system to the state system, which led them to file for a motion of figuring out how many white defendants had been transferred and the reason for their transfer. They had proof of affidavits to support their claim, but the prosecutors denied them their records, but the Supreme courts agreed to take the case. The court rationalized that Armstrong needed to produce evidence of white defendants supposed to be charged. This was impossible since the evidence belonged to those prosecutors in the most powerful and hence had immune to racial bias.