BEASLEY HOPES SENTENCING ERROR OPENS CELL DOOR

For the time being, the most controversial figure of the civil rights
era in Mobile sits in a federal prison in Florida, nearly 14 years and
counting into a sentence of life without parole for conspiring to push
crack cocaine.

Noble Columbus Beasley, 71, and his supporters -- who know him as
"Bip" -- have long argued that he was framed as punishment for his
outspokenness for black rights in the 1960s and '70s. Authorities have
dismissed portrayals of Beasley as a man persecuted for his advocacy,
noting his convictions for extortion and dealing heroin prior to his
1990 crack conviction.

Beasley's guilt or innocence doesn't much matter, however, when it
comes to the most recent filings in his crack case, which center on an
apparent sentencing miscalculation by court officials. Nearly everyone
involved seems to agree that Beasley was incorrectly sentenced, and
that the proper term should have ranged from less than 23 years up to
nearly 34 years.

The error offers at least some hope for him that he could walk out of
prison one day.

Beasley himself discovered the discrepancy while researching behind
bars for his repeated, unsuccessful appeals and his lawsuits against a
federal judge, an employee in the court clerk's office and his prison
warden, among others.

"Nobody picked it up 'til later, and to his credit, he was the one who
did," said Federal Defender Carlos Williams of Mobile, Beasley's new
lawyer.

Getting Beasley a release date, however, isn't as simple as having
deputy U.S. marshals bring him from his cell to the federal courthouse
downtown on St. Joseph Street for a fresh sentencing hearing before
U.S. District Judge William Steele. The same pleadings that drew
attention to the incorrect sentence also all but exhausted Beasley's
avenues for appeal.

Beasley, a bear-sized man who grew up in the Toulminville neighborhood
of north Mobile, made his name rallying, antagonizing and organizing
others.

As head of the Neighborhood Organized Workers during the civil rights
era, Beasley led protests against the America's Junior Miss program
and various Mardi Gras events, among other targets.

"His work to foster equal opportunity for his people is well
documented," Mobile City Councilman Fred Richardson wrote of his
former NOW comrade in one of numerous letters to Steele from Beasley
supporters last year.

But Beasley also clashed with the local NAACP chapter, as well as the
Mobile County Improvement Association, a coalition of black educators.
Longtime City Commissioner Joe Langan -- widely considered a racial
progressive -- once said that descriptions of Beasley as a force for
positive change turned his stomach, according to a 1997 article in
Mobile Bay Monthly magazine.

The Rev. William James, of St. Patrick's Catholic Church in
Robertsdale, told Steele in a letter that his days as pastor in
Toulminville, where he met regularly with Beasley and joined some of
his demonstrations, were among the fondest of his 50 years as a priest
in the Mobile area.

"Mr. Beasley was a strong leader in many ways, and we were good
friends," James wrote. "That his life at that time, as leader and as a
member of the black community of Mobile, was fraught with a mixture of
the good and the struggle and pain of most black people, goes without
saying."

In July 1968, black radical Stokely Carmichael visited Mobile on NOW's
invitation, with Beasley welcoming him at the airport. Police deployed
en masse, anticipating public disturbances that never occurred after
Carmichael spoke to a crowd of more than 700 downtown, according to
news accounts.

Police took Beasley into custody more than once during his marches and
demonstrations. But his first serious difficulty with the law came in
1970: He was charged with murdering a man who had reportedly talked
about taking money to kill him. Beasley gained acquittal at the highly
publicized trial, which he claimed was an attempt to embarrass him.

By 1974, he went back on trial, was convicted of heroin-dealing and
federal income tax violations, and handed a 23-year prison term. After
Beasley served several years, his sentence was reduced on appeal to
five years of probation.

Also that year, federal jurors found Beasley guilty of extortion in a
scheme involving payoffs from performers at the Mobile Civic Center,
then called the Mobile Municipal Auditorium. His 10-year term for that
crime eventually was reduced to the 310 days he had served, with the
remainder suspended.

At 58, when many men might anticipate retirement, Beasley was sent to
prison in 1990 for life. Jurors in U.S. District Court convicted him
of conspiring with several other people to distribute nearly 20 pounds
of crack cocaine in and around the Trinity Gardens community that
straddles the Mobile-Prichard line.

In legal briefs and public comments, Beasley has maintained his
innocence, as have his backers. The case against him was built largely
on the word of felons, Beasley's supporters have noted, and several of
those witnesses have since recanted their testimony, according to
letters the witnesses have written to various court officials.

Those in Beasley's camp also point to FBI files showing that the
agency -- using helicopters, telephone records and covert recordings
- -- investigated Beasley for at least a decade prior to his crack
conviction. Agents reviewed allegations including jury tampering and
drug dealing but found no cause to charge Beasley until the 1990 crack
case, according to bureau documents.

Beasley, who is serving his sentence at the federal prison in
Marianna, Fla., south of Dothan, was unavailable for comment for this
story.

Esther Beasley, his daughter, said Mobile's white leadership had
always eyed him warily. "I think more than anything else, they feared
him because they couldn't control him," she said. "Anytime you can't
predict something, you can't understand it, you tend to fear it and
label it, and I think that's what happened with him. "

Esther Beasley said her father was particularly distressed to be
linked by prosecutors to crack cocaine, which had harmed two of their
family members. "It practically destroyed the family, destroyed our
lives," she said.

At the heart of the latest filings in Beasley's case is Amendment 505
to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. That amendment lowered the maximum
punishment range for federal drug offenders, based on the amount of
drugs involved in their crime. It came in 1994, amid a politically
charged outcry about lengthy mandatory sentences for federal drug
criminals, which often punished kingpins and small-time couriers in
comparable fashion.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission made Amendment 505 retroactive, meaning
defendants who had been sentenced under the more stringent earlier
guidelines could apply to have their sentences reduced.

Within two years of his 1990 crack conviction, Beasley filed four
motions for a new trial before U.S. District Judge Alex Howard and an
appeal to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Some of those
motions were based on Amendment 505. All of them were rejected.

"The defendant has failed to explain how this Court can consider a
motion to modify based on Amendment 505 after Judge Howard has denied
relief on this basis and the 11th Circuit has affirmed that denial,"
Steele wrote in an order last month.

In 2001, Beasley convinced a U.S. probation officer that his sentence
had been incorrectly calculated.

Justice system officials, Beasley discovered, had used the 1990
version of the sentencing guidelines when they should have used the
1988 version, which was still in effect at the time of Beasley's
alleged crime.

The later rules were more stringent in that they no longer allowed
parole from federal prison terms.

"After looking more closely at his allegations, I find that he is
correct in the assertion that his sentence was based on guidelines
which were not yet in effect," reads a portion of a letter that
supervising probation officer Gerald L. Duncan Jr. wrote to Beasley's
case manager at the Marianna prison.

However, "As Mr. Beasley correctly understands, the case is, at this
point, beyond the jurisdiction of the Probation Office," Duncan
concluded in his September 2001 letter.

A few months earlier, in response to one of Beasley's many court
motions, federal prosecutors also acknowledged that his argument
seemed legitimate. They said, though, that their hands were tied
because several judges had already denied Beasley's appeals of similar
issues.

"The question raised does indeed appear to have legal merit," wrote
then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Ginny Granade, who has since become the
Southern District of Alabama's chief federal judge. "Because relief
appears to be procedurally barred, however, the United States is
constrained to oppose" a new sentencing hearing.

Granade recommended that the court appoint a lawyer to help Beasley
figure out a way around the impediments. Almost a year ago, Williams,
the federal defender in Mobile, agreed to Beasley's family's requests
that he review the case.

By last July, Williams had filed a motion asking Steele to revisit
Beasley's sentence. Beasley's earlier motions had been filed without
the help of a lawyer, Williams pointed out, and were denied on
technical grounds rather than on their merits.

In an order last month, Steele stopped short of denying Beasley's
request for a reduced sentence. He gave Williams until Jan. 16 to
further explain his arguments; prosecutors will then have until the
end of the month to respond.

U.S. Attorney David York declined to discuss the case, saying it would
be inappropriate for him to comment on pending litigation.

Williams said he has faith that there will be a way for Steele to act
on the sentencing error. He mentioned a legal premise known as equity,
which allows injustices to be rectified by unorthodox means.

"The law on equity says, 'The law will not suffer a wrong without
righting it,'" Williams said.

"My attitude is, there must be some way to fix this."