CLINTON DIDN'T TAKE PARDONS FAR ENOUGH

He should have done something about the thousands of nonviolent drug
offenders serving long, mandatory sentences.

Almost as troublesome as the last-minute pardons President Clinton decided
to grant rich, powerful and connected figures like financier Marc Rich are
questions about the pardons he failed to issue to hundreds of very ordinary
people caught in the legal traps of our misguided "war on drugs."

The number of Americans incarcerated for drug offenses has spiraled upward
tenfold since 1980. Some 500,000 are now held - 80,000 in federal prisons.
Many are serving extremely long sentences - 20, 25 years, life - with no
chance of parole.

Under the mandatory sentences enacted by Congress in 1988, federal drug
offenders typically serve longer than persons convicted of rape, assault or
robbery - often longer than murderers.

Bill Clinton knew all this. In the same "Rolling Stone" interview (in the
magazine's January edition) in which he supported decriminalizing
possession of small amounts of marijuana, he also acknowledged that many
drug sentences "are too long for nonviolent offenders." The great majority
of federal judges, he noted, now want to do away with mandatory sentences.

Additionally, an intensive campaign was launched to persuade Clinton to
grant clemency to nonviolent drug offenders - small-time users or carriers
- - who have ended up serving decades-long sentences under the mandatory
federal sentencing guidelines.

In the final weeks of his term, Clinton received an eloquent plea from 675
leading clergy of all denominations. Their proposal: that he commute the
sentences of virtually all low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who had
already served five years of their terms.

Not only are the sentences excessive, the clergy noted, but thousands of
the offenders are parents whose children are deeply hurt by the separations.

A prisoners' rights group, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, even
supplied Clinton with a list of the nearly 500 prisoners who would been
released had they been convicted following (and not before) a 1994 "safety
valve" law that allows judges to be more lenient on first-time offenders.

So what did Clinton decide?

In his final day in office, following up on a handful of earlier drug case
pardons, he included 22 drug offenders in his final pardon list.

What a dismal showing, when one considers that Clinton could legitimately
have pardoned hundreds, ideally thousands!

Even worse, it turns out that one of the lucky 22 who received a
presidential commutation looks more like a drug kingpin than an innocent
victim. His name: Carlos Vignali Jr., a major player in a Twin Cities
cocaine ring before his 1994 conviction and 15-year sentence for a major
interstate cocaine shipment. Vignali's father, Minnesota newspapers are
reporting, donated $160,000 to Democratic officeholders after his son went
on trial.

Says a disappointed Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy
Foundation, which worked with the clergy on their appeal:

"We were hoping to elevate the thinking of the president about these
issues. To reflect on the appropriate and merciful and just use of the
pardoning power. To leave a just legacy. It's evident he didn't care about
that."

Had Clinton worked to pardon several hundred deserving minor drug
offenders, Sterling suggests, he would have received press accolades.

Even more important, adds Sterling, "It would have been an extremely
powerful policy message to the new president - and Congress - that drug
sentences are an issue that needs serious attention."

Without that, one can at least detect other signs of a reform tide sweeping
in. George W. Bush hardly championed reduced sentences for anything as
governor of Texas. Yet if the new administration has its ears open at all,
it will hear some of its friends urging radically new drug policy.

An online news service, stateline.org, reports that seven Republican
governors are now vocally supporting less jail time and more treatment,
supervision and community service for drug offenders. They are Govs. George
Pataki (New York), Gary Johnson (New Mexico), Jim Geringer (Wyoming), Mike
Leavitt (Utah), Dirk Kempthorne (Idaho), Frank Keating (Oklahoma) and Mike
Huckabee (Arkansas).

The guiding concerns: prisons crowded with inmates who have chronic alcohol
or drug problems; the high costs of prisons - to build them, to maintain
them; and the blatant failure of nearly three decades of a furious,
punitive war on drugs.

"It makes more sense to treat people with a drug problem rather than simply
incarcerating them and putting them in a place where their problems are not
met," Arkansas' Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, said in his State
of the State address last month.

Also dying an overdue death: the idea that cutting off foreign drug supply
will happen, or make a difference. President Bush's compadre, Mexican
President Vicente Fox, tells the truth here: "(The United States) has shown
a grand inability to reduce drug consumption. It has shown a grand
inability to prevent drugs from entering."

Bottom line: America's entire anti-drug strategy needs revamping. Clinton
had a chance to start with the humblest victims. He failed. But the
rationale for the status quo is crumbling.