CLINTON FREES MAN WITH MANDATORY SENTENCE

Mercy: Billy Langston Was A First-Time Offender Whose Case Became A Symbol
In Arguments About The Issue.

Billy Langston, who spent nearly eight years in prison for what some believe
was a minor drug offense, always seems to both laugh and cry on important
days in his life.

When he was sentenced for conspiracy to manufacture PCP on Aug. 29, 1994, he
giggled nervously because he thought the judge said 360 days. When Langston,
a first-time drug offender, realized the judge had said 360 months, he
started to weep.

The pattern of laughter and tears continued Saturday after Langston was
pardoned by President Clinton. After joyously swinging his 11-year-old son
high in the air, Langston dabbed at his eyes with a wrinkled tissue.

"It's been too long," the 46-year-old Los Angeles man said.

Langston's imprisonment had become a symbol for advocacy groups against
mandatory federal sentencing standards. Many of them believed the final days
of Clinton's term marked the last, best chance for prisoners such as
Langston, who were seeking pardons before President Bush took office
Saturday.

"I don't think tomorrow or a week from now there's a good chance of stuff
like this happening," said Langston's lawyer, Burke Kappler, who had taken
Langston's case for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a nonprofit group.

Although his pardon had been rumored for weeks, Langston spent Friday night
staring at his cell ceiling and wondering what the president was doing.

"I was so nervous. I know [Clinton] had a lot of personal stuff to take care
of and I was just watching CNN, hoping he signed my petition," Langston
said.

He went home to his aunt's faded pink stucco home near Hyde Park, where
family members gathered to greet him.

Langston said he "thought it was a joke" when the Terminal Island Federal
Prison warden approached him about 9 a.m. and told him he was a free man.

It was only after Langston said goodbye to other inmates and rode away in a
cab that he realized he wasn't going back.

"It was a sweet day," he said.

Langston was arrested in 1993 while driving back from San Francisco, where
he had picked up enough chemicals to make more than 140 pounds of the drug
PCP. Langston was between jobs at the time and was paid $1,000 to carry the
chemicals to Los Angeles.

Langston, who said he had never manufactured PCP and didn't purchase the
chemicals, did not believe he was at risk for arrest "because you could get
the chemicals over the counter," he said.

Although Langston never claimed he was innocent, he did not think he would
get a stiff sentence for what he believes is a relatively minor offense.
But, under federal law, where sentences are determined by the quantity of
drugs and past offenses, Langston received a 30-year sentence.

He had been convicted of a DUI early in the 1990s.

Judge David Kenyon, who later reduced the sentence to 22 years, was troubled
by the stiff term, saying: "There is no question that this is an unjust,
unfair sentence. . . . I think that this is a shameful thing that we've come
to this."

Langston, still wearing a prison-issue gray sweatshirt when he arrived at
his aunt's, admitted that he had been angry after the trial, primarily
because another man in the car received a lighter sentence in a plea
agreement.

But jail counseling helped him gain perspective, he said. Langston, who
admits to having used cocaine and marijuana, also entered a drug
rehabilitation program and knocked a year off his sentence.

"I kept fighting," he said.

Although he unsuccessfully appealed his case once, he kept researching legal
avenues and wrote to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The group took up
his case because it was representative of so many others.

"There are a thousand Billy Langstons in prison today who are first-time
offenders and don't deserve sentences designed for kingpins," said Julie
Steward, president of the group.

Although Saturday was a good day for her organization, Steward said stiff
federal sentencing laws are still a problem.

"Today was just a wonderful blip on the radar screen," she said.

Though Langston said federal sentencing laws should be changed and that he
plans to work with the families group, his thoughts Saturday were on his own
family. While his son Martell gamely answered questions from reporters, the
emotions of the day overcame him and he started to cry, burying his head in
his father's stomach.

"It's all right now," Langston said gently, patting his son's thin back.
"I'm back."