PRESIDENT COULD DO GREATER GOOD WITH PARDONS

ALMOST all of the 63 executive clemencies President Clinton granted
recently -- including the one granted former House Ways and Means Committee
chairman Dan Rostenkowski -- were fairly ordinary holiday pardons of people
who already had served their sentences. That meant they were largely
symbolic gestures of forgiveness requiring little in the way of
presidential courage. But four were in a different category, involving
people still in jail or, in one case, a man who had yet to serve a sentence.

Of those four, the most significant were the most obscure. Mr. Clinton
commuted the lengthy sentences on drug charges of two women, Dorothy Gaines
and Kemba Smith. Both had been bit players in crack rings, yet had received
hugely disproportionate prison terms of 19 and 24 years respectively.

The commutations point out the excesses that federal drug sentencing laws
are capable of producing, and they also remedy serious individual injustices.

In his weeks Left in office, Mr. Clinton would do a great service if he
found other such cases where clemency is appropriate. We have in mind not
the cases that likely would make headlines. Mr. Clinton reportedly is
considering pardons for Whitewater criminals Susan McDougal and Webster
Hubbell, for example, and has said he would consider the possibility of
clemency for Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist convicted of
killing two FBI agents back in 1975. Those would be one-time-only political
acts.

Where the pardon power could make a lasting difference is in regard to
nonviolent drug offenders. By letting more go, the President can draw
attention in his final days in office to the injustice of a distorted
federal drug sentencing system that does no one any good.

The commutations the other day -- along with a batch over the summer --
were a good start, but the recent commutations also were buried beneath the
group of Christmas pardons that conveyed a far more general message. Mr.
Clinton could do much worse than to go out with a strong statement that we
need to reexamine this area of criminal law.