KEMBA SMITH GRANTED THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

Yesterday was momentous for the Smith family. Kemba Smith was released from
prison, where she'd been held for more than six years. She was granted
clemency -- the last hope she had pinned everything on. She was to return,
finally: to her parents' house outside Richmond; to her 6-year-old son, who
has never known her as a free person; and to an unlikely celebrity.

"President Clinton's commutation of Kemba's sentence answers our prayers --
nearly seven years of prayers, which seem like an eternity," said the
parents, Gus and Odessa Smith, in a statement.

Kemba Smith stood -- and stands -- for a lot of things now, one day after
Clinton officially commuted her sentence of 241/2 years, which she spent
mainly at a federal prison in Danbury, Conn. For one, she stands for the
controversy surrounding federal drug sentencing laws passed in the '80s:
Smith was a fringe player in a crack cocaine ring -- a first-time,
nonviolent offender -- whose penalties were greater than the average state
sentence for murder or voluntary manslaughter.

Smith also stands as testament to the wreckage that physical abuse can make
of a young life. It was her boyfriend's abuse, she has said, that made her
afraid to leave their life of crime. She has changed a great deal during
her time in prison. There are still glimmers of the teenager she once was
- -- naive, sheltered -- but a certain toughness overshadows it now. She is
29 going on 50.

Kemba Smith was one of 62 prisoners granted clemency yesterday, just in
time for Christmas. A lame-duck president must not seem so ineffectual to
her. For years, her parents had tried nearly every avenue available.
Numerous appeals and civil motions, along with a substantial grass-roots
campaign, left them with no relief, desperate and twice bankrupted. In
between speeches at universities, visits to Connecticut and raising Kemba's
son, Armani, they prayed. Odessa Smith cried a great deal. Earlier this
year, they filed a request for clemency with the help of the NAACP's Legal
Defense Fund, which has been working on the case pro bono since 1996.

Early yesterday morning, an attorney from the Legal Defense Fund came to
Danbury to meet with Smith. The first buzz about her pending release hit
the news around noon, and Gus Smith, reached at home, said simply, "We're
hoping and praying." The commutation came through later in the afternoon,
and prison officials began processing paperwork. At 5:29, Smith was
officially released.

At the turn of the last decade, Smith -- the middle-class only daughter of
a school teacher and an accountant -- was a sophomore at Hampton University
in Virginia when she became involved in a relationship with a man nine
years her senior. Jamaican-born Peter Hall turned out to be a drug dealer
who used young women as drug-carrying mules in a murderous East Coast crack
ring. But this information came gradually to Smith, as did her descent into
fear, as Hall became increasingly abusive.

A low-level participant in Hall's circle, Smith helped him in a number of
ways, bailing him out of jail and carrying money for him, and even keeping
a gun in her purse. And when push finally came to shove in the autumn of
'94, Smith -- reluctant to bargain information for a likely reduction in
her sentence -- wound up being charged with trafficking 255 kilograms of
crack cocaine. She never actually sold any drugs.

About the same time, Hall was murdered.

Drug law reform groups crowed yesterday that mandatory minimums and
sentencing guidelines are facing increasing scrutiny. Dorothy Gaines of
Mobile, Ala., a low-level drug offender carrying a weighty sentence of 19
years, was also granted clemency yesterday. The plights of Gaines and Smith
have been heavily publicized.

"Kemba Smith is not the drug kingpin type that Congress intended to target
when it passed the federal mandatory minimums," said Laura Sager, executive
director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "Like thousands of other
low-level drug offenders, she may have deserved some punishment but she
received a disproportionately harsh sentence for her role in the drug trade."

A judge who rejected one of Smith's appeals in October '99 wrote that her
prison sentence was "truly heavy" and represented one of the "unintended
consequences" of congressional legislation. He said he could do nothing,
but recommended that Smith apply for clemency.

Yesterday, that advice bore fruit. Now, Smith starts the long process of
becoming free.

"They've got a lot of rebuilding to do," said veteran journalist Reginald
Stuart, who broke Smith's story for the now-defunct Emerge magazine in 1996
and has stayed close to the Smiths. "I will visit sometime soon and meet
the Smith family -- because I met Kemba Smith and I met her parents, but I
never met the Smith family."

Citing their need for privacy, a spokeswoman for Smith said she and her
family would not be speaking to the media. But in her statement, she said,
"Since I was incarcerated in September, 1994 . . . I have dreamed of the
opportunity to be an everyday parent."

Now that begins.