FREE AT LAST

A Presidential Pardon In A Drug Case Helps
Right A Wrong For Dorothy Gaines

I'm gonna need a hug," says Cozy Brown as an old friend walks through
the door of his Prichard, Ala., soul-food restaurant. Dorothy Gaines
hasn't been by in years--so long, in fact, that she doesn't recognize
Brown's new dining room, with its enormous Last Supper mural, or the
roaring interstate nearby. But then, after the ordeal Gaines has been
through, even the most commonplace things seem jarringly unfamiliar.
"My daughter handed me a cell phone the other day," Gaines tells Brown
with a smile, "and I said, 'What's that, a big candy bar?'"

She may occasionally joke about her plight today, but for Gaines, 42,
the past decade has been a nightmare--one that ended only with the
intervention of the President of the United States. It all began in
1990, when Gaines, a widow raising three children, let her boyfriend,
Terrell Hines, move into her tidy public-housing residence in a suburb
of Mobile. Gaines soon discovered that Hines, now 51, was hooked on
crack cocaine and enrolled him in a rehab program.

Though he would complete his treatment, her troubles were just
beginning. On Aug. 21, 1993, police arrived at Gaines's house and
arrested Hines and Gaines on charges of trafficking in crack
cocaine--a crime she insists she did not commit. After the state
dropped the case because it could produce no physical evidence, Gaines
asked Hines to move out. That did little good. The next spring they
were indicted with several others in a federal conspiracy case. After
a jury found her guilty on July 29, she was sentenced to nearly 20
years in prison with no hope of parole. "Dorothy Gaines was found
guilty after a fair trial," maintains U.S. Attorney J. Don Foster, now
head of the prosecutor's office that handled her case.

Today, Gaines is once again free and living with her children in
Mobile--thanks to Bill Clinton. On Dec. 22, the President commuted
Gaines's sentence and ordered her released from prison. And while
several of Clinton's last-minute pardons have exposed him to the
bitterest criticism, his gesture toward prisoners like Gaines has
generally been applauded. Given the country's get-tough stance in
recent years against even the most trivial drug crimes, that may seem
surprising. But as prisons have filled up with thousands of bit
players often sentenced to the same hard time as drug kingpins, there
has been a gradual sea change. Gaines is seen as one of the most
prominent examples of past sentencing excesses.

While it is clear that Gaines knew several members of a drug-dealing
ring, there is little evidence, aside from testimony given by
convicted felons, to suggest she was part of the operation. Tried
under drug conspiracy laws revised by Congress at the height of the
crack epidemic of the late-'80s, she was charged with distributing and
storing drugs at her house for a Mobile-based operation run by Dennis
Rowe--even though a thorough search of her home had turned up nothing.
Indeed, no drugs were produced at her trial. Prosecutors won a
conviction based entirely on accusations made by four coconspirators,
all of whom took the stand against Gaines in exchange for potential
shortened sentences.

"What is important to recognize in Dorothy's case is that the
government had no drugs, no scales, no residue, no money, no fancy
clothing or cars," says Eric E. Sterling, president of Washington,
D.C.'s Criminal Justice Policy Foundation and a critic of the harsh
mandatory federal sentences as well as of conspiracy laws that require
no corroborating physical evidence to back up claims made by
prosecution witnesses. Then, because of rigid sentencing guidelines
and because other defendants testified against her, Gaines, whose only
previous offense was writing a bad check for $ 115, received the
harshest sentence of anyone tried.

Critics point out that a system in which so-called snitches can win
reductions in their sentences by incriminating others encourages
felons to lie. For some the very harshness of drug sentences raises a
question of fairness. "Someone in possession of four ounces of cocaine
can have a minimum sentence of 15 years, while someone guilty of rape
could serve eight," says New York Gov. George Pataki, a tough-on-crime
Republican who last January proposed easing his own state's
drug-sentencing laws. "There is a disparity there that needs to be
changed."

That, however, was not a national concern on May 19, 1995, when Gaines
boarded a plane en route to the federal women's prison in Danbury,
Conn. "The day she went away it looked like our whole world was torn
down. Mama was the only person we had," says Gaines's daughter Chara,
then 12, who, with her brother, Phillip, 10, moved in with their older
sister Natasha, then a 19-year-old college student raising two
children of her own.

Gaines knew from experience what her children were going through. Born
Dorothy Thomas in Mobile, she was raised dirt-poor by her maternal
grandparents (whose last name she took as her own) in the logging town
of Putnam, Ala. Gaines saw her own four siblings scattered to foster
homes after the deaths, in quick succession, of her grandparents and
her father, Andrew Thomas, a restaurant owner who moved to
Philadelphia a few years after her birth. Shortly after the deaths,
Gaines's mother, Vera, an alcoholic who once threatened Dorothy with
an ax, was sent to a mental hospital.

Alone, Gaines moved to Mobile at 16 and finally found a job in a
cafeteria. Three years later she qualified for public housing and
reclaimed two of her siblings. She had also fallen in love with a
shipyard worker named Larry Johnson and became pregnant with Natasha.
"It was a mistake," says Gaines now, "a very big mistake." Johnson,
who later worked in Dennis Rowe's drug ring, never acknowledged
paternity until the day he took the stand to testify against Gaines at
her trial.

Gaines has been romantically involved twice since Johnson, and both
relationships ended unhappily. Charles Taylor, an auto-body painter
four years her senior, whom Gaines met on a 1981 church outing, became
her common-law husband and the father of Chara and Phillip before he
died suddenly of a heart attack in 1986. Three years later, she began
dating Terrell Hines, who began driving drugs between Miami and Mobile
for Rowe in 1992. "I do feel maybe if I hadn't been there she would
never have been involved in this," says Hines, who swore under oath at
Gaines's trial that he had never discussed his illegal activities with
her. He is currently serving a 14-year sentence.

Once behind bars, Gaines became a voracious letter writer, sometimes
as part of her effort to win a reversal of her conviction but often
just to keep in touch with the world outside. "They took away my
freedom, but they couldn't take my joy," says Gaines, who is proud
that she kept her sense of humor in prison--even if she put on 120
lbs. and suffered occasional bouts of depression sparked by events as
seemingly remote as the 1997 death of Princess Diana. Her name was
eventually passed along by a prisoners' advocacy group to Gregg
Shapiro, a Boston corporate litigator interested in drug policy.
Working pro bono and with help from Tracey Hubbard and others at the
firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart, Shapiro petitioned the White House for
a presidential pardon last August. Finally, in December, as Gaines lay
in her cell contemplating another Christmas behind bars, a guard told
her a lawyer had called. "I said, 'Dorothy, pack your bags,'" says
Hubbard, 30.

Back in Mobile, Gaines celebrated New Year's Day and her newfound
freedom by cooking a huge batch of chitterlings, collard greens and
sweet potato pies for friends and family. She may have arrived home
just in time. Chara, at 17, is still in the ninth grade, and Phillip
had spent a month in juvenile hall for breaking a court-ordered
curfew. "It's hard starting over with nothing," says Gaines of keeping
her family together, finding a job and an affordable place to live.
"But then I give thanks, because at least I'm free. By the grace of
God, I'm free."