MANDATORY MINIMUMS, ABSENT JUSTICE

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. No parole.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, has introduced a bill, HR1681, 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 being 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.''

When prosecutors can win a conspiracy conviction for some rube at the
bottom of the drug food chain, there is too much opportunity -- and
temptation -- for abuse. 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.

Waters' bill may not even be heard this year. At least, the tide is
beginning to turn on the right. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III
told the New York Times in March, ``I think mandatory minimum sentences for
drug offenders ought to be reviewed.'' Damn straight.

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.