END MANDATORY MINIMUMS

Harsh Drug Laws Miss The Big Fish

(San Francisco) In 1995, a federal judge sentenced Kemba Smith to 24
1/2 years in prison without parole. Smith didn't murder anyone. She
didn't beat anyone. She wasn't a major crime figure. She was a black
single mother in her 20s with the rotten judgment to have fallen for a
violent drug dealer.

According to a piece in Emerge magazine, after lying to authorities,
Smith was getting ready to cooperate with federal investigators who
were after her boyfriend, Peter Hall. But when Hall's dead body was
found, the feds used their full force on Smith.

She pleaded guilty to three drug charges, including conspiring to help
Hall with his 255-kilogram crack trade. Help him, she did, although
the 255-kilogram figure includes deals that, supporters maintain,
predated their relationship. She thought she'd be sentenced to an
extra year in jail, or maybe time served. But thanks to a justice
system that doesn't care if the punishment fits the crime, Smith still
faces two decades behind bars.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has introduced a bill to end federal
mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, including possession,
distribution, manufacturing and importation. The Republican-led
Congress should take a good, hard look at her bill and the problems it
addresses. If justice officials were using mandatory minimum laws to
go after the big sharks, it would be one thing, but too frequently,
these long sentences are used to put minnows away for years beyond a
fair sentence.

Monica Pratt, spokeswoman for Families Against Mandatory Minimums,
explained, ''The more information that you have to trade, the more
information you can give to prosecutors to reduce your sentence. The
less information you have to trade, the less of a chance you will have
to reduce your sentence. So, the federal and state prisons are full of
low-level nonviolent drug offenders instead of the drug kingpins.''

Kemba Smith was no angel. She broke a number of laws, including lying
to the authorities. She may well have deserved to do jail time --- but
not 24 1/2 years. She won't be able to spend time alone with her son
until he is in his mid-20s. ''Her case is the perfect example of the
lowest person on the totem pole getting the most amount of time,''
Pratt noted.

For some critics, the problem with these Draconian sentences may be
the money. It will cost close to half a million dollars in today's
dollars to keep Smith behind bars.

That's not the issue for me. Those dollars are nothing next to the
rapacious theft of Smith's young adulthood. For a series of stupid
mistakes, she is forfeiting more years of her life than many murderers
serve.

That rough justice smarts all the more when you figure the role race
often plays in this Draconian system. According to Marc Mauer of The
Sentencing Project, a group critical of harsh sentencing laws,
African-Americans constitute 13 percent of monthly drug users in
America --- that stat comes from a federal survey --- yet blacks
represent 35 percent of state and federal drug possession arrests and
55 percent of convictions. A federal source confirmed the arrest and
conviction numbers. Roughly a third of federal drug inmates are black.

I suspect that if a number of white screw-up kids endured these harsh
sentences, Congress would have ended mandatory minimums a long time
ago.