LAWMAKERS HEAR ARGUMENTS ON MANDATORY MINIMUM DRUG SENTENCES

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Prosecutors say mandatory minimum drug sentences are an
essential investigative tool, but critics argued to a House panel Thursday
that the harsh sentences discriminate against minorities and overcrowd prisons.

"They provide the government with unreviewable discretion to target
particular defendants or classes of defendants for harsh punishment," Wade
Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights,
told the House subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and human
resources.

Mandatory minimums clear up any disparities about sentencing by ensuring
everyone gets similar sentences, said John Roth, chief of the Narcotic and
Dangerous Drug section of the Justice Department's criminal division.
Meanwhile, the guidelines also have safety valves to allow prosecutors and
judges to give lighter sentences when appropriate, he said.

One way to get a lighter sentences is to turn over information about other
drug dealers, suppliers and users, which prosecutors use to get information
on other criminals, he said. About one-third of the drug defendants
sentenced in 1998 escaped the mandatory minimum provisions, he said.

"Congress has given us a powerful tool to conduct effective narcotic
investigations," Roth said.

However, many first-time or less involved offenders aren't able to escape
the mandatory minimums because they don't have any information to pass
along to prosecutors to help catch drug suppliers or operators, unlike the
big drug kingpins, said Frances Rosmeyer of Families Against Mandatory
Minimums.

And studies show whites are much more likely to escape mandatory minimums
than blacks or Hispanics, said William Moffitt, president of the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "Racial disparities in sentencing
and incarceration have never been worse," he said.

The number of inmates in federal prisons grew from 24,000 to 58,000 in the
80s, and then doubled again in the 90s to 140,000, officials said. "It
appears the only thing that mandatory minimum have accomplished is growth
in the federal prison system," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

Former Virginia Gov. George Allen also called for increasing the federal
minimum sentence for dealing cocaine to equal the punishment for crack
cocaine. Complaints have been raised about the disparity of the punishments
between powder cocaine and crack cocaine, with advocates saying the higher
punishment for crack affects blacks disproportionally.

Allen, who is campaigning for one of Virginia's U.S. Senate seats, said he
didn't care about the race of a person dealing drugs. "If that person's
doing it, that vile person, that parasite, should be treated harshly," he said.