AFTER 30 FREE YEARS, MAN FACES LIFE FOR 2 GRAMS OF DRUG

DALLAS - At 56, Charles Edward Garrett is a senior citizen among drug
inmates in the Texas prison system. In a warehouse of young offenders who
have never known hope, he is different, and not merely for his balding pate
and gray goatee.

When he was arrested last Oct. 12 at his workplace, the maintenance shop of
a Dallas medical school, he was forced to leave a $33,000-a-year mechanic's
job he had held since 1984. He was a popular employee, a seemingly ordinary
fellow who paid his taxes, drove an aging Ford pickup and had a girlfriend
he enjoyed staying home with at night.

But he also had a secret:

In 1968, a time when possessing even a minuscule amount of almost any
illegal drug in Texas could bring a life prison term, Garrett, then a
heroin addict, was caught with about 2 grams of the powder, enough to sate
his habit for maybe 36 hours. His offense--the only crime he has been
prosecuted for in his life--might easily have resulted in probation under
Texas law today. But back then, as a strung-out black junkie, he got the
maximum sentence from an all-white Dallas jury: life.

He jumped bail, however, and later kicked heroin and began life anew. Using
an assumed name, he traveled the country for years, from job to job, before
returning to Dallas. For three decades, as the public's attitude toward
drug addiction and punishment changed, he lived quietly, a nearly forgotten
fugitive, until one day last fall when an informant turned him in.

Now, despite his lawyers' efforts to gain leniency, Garrett is in prison
doing his time, a life sentence imposed under the law and social climate of
a bygone era. With credit for good behavior he may get a parole hearing in
a decade.

"I led a productive life all these years," Garrett said recently at the
Dallas County Jail, before his transfer to a state penitentiary. "They say
the criminal justice system is supposed to rehabilitate a person. Well, it
seems to me I did that on my own."

As the Dallas County District Attorney's Office sees it, making a deal with
Garrett's lawyers for a reduced sentence would have sent "an inappropriate
message to the public."

"We don't want to encourage somebody else to flee our jurisdiction in an
effort to benefit themselves," said Michael Carnes, the office's No. 2
prosecutor.

Garrett's lawyers had planned to file a court motion last month that might
have resulted in a term of community service, but said such a motion would
not have succeeded without the district attorney's concurrence. Prosecutors
declined to go along.

Carnes said Garrett is "stuck with the law, the verdict and the sentence as
it was handed down. Being absent for 30 years doesn't change anything,"
even though current law does not allow such a sentence.

"In the 25 years I've been practicing law, this is a unique situation,"
said one of Garrett's lawyers, Richard Anderson. He said Garrett eventually
could be freed by an appellate ruling or a grant of clemency, but neither
is highly likely. "This is law, it's politics, it's race relations; it's
just everything balled up in one case."

Born in 1942, Garrett said he grew up poor and graduated from a segregated
Dallas high school. He went to work as a janitor, hoping someday to become
an electrician. But heroin got hold of him in the early 1960s. He said a
friend of his was a jazz drummer, "and I used to go to his sets over at
this club." The musicians used heroin, he said. "So I tried it. And it
escalated from there."

By 1968, when he was 26, he said, he was a hard-core junkie. Police records
show he was taken into custody in the 1960s in burglary, theft and forgery
investigations, but was not prosecuted. Garrett said he did not steal to
support his habit.

"I knew people all around who'd take care of me, people I could fix with,"
he said.

Across the country, there were thousands of inner-city junkies like
Garrett, but America generally took little notice. The '60s counterculture
had only recently begun to give drug use a white, middle-class face, which
in time would lead to less Draconian drug statutes nationwide. But until
then, the laws in Texas and other states had gone largely unchanged for
decades. "As long as it was confined to blacks and Hispanics, no one
cared," said Gerry Goldstein, a San Antonio defense lawyer since 1969.

On Nov. 27, 1968, Garrett said, he woke up craving a fix as usual, and went
to visit a friend, Henry Adolphus Sneed, also 26. Sneed, an addict and
dealer, almost always had a stash of heroin in his Dallas apartment.

According to a Dallas police report written that day, an investigator spoke
with an informant who had been in the apartment and had "observed Henry
Sneed, alias Bubba, and other persons . . . inject heroin into their arms."
At noon, two police detectives and a pair of federal drug agents walked in
with a search warrant and confronted two "colored males," Sneed and
Garrett, in separate bedrooms.

In Sneed's bedroom they seized 375 capsules of heroin. Recalling the type
of capsules commonly used back then, authorities said recently that each
likely held 75 to 100 milligrams of the drug. The narcs also found an ounce
of heroin in a prophylactic. All told, Sneed probably was holding 55 to 65
grams.

In the room with Garrett they found 23 capsules, or about 2 grams. Garrett
said it was enough to keep him fixed for a day, maybe a day and a half.

Sneed, caught with 30 times more heroin than Garrett, was not prosecuted.
When his trial date came, he was ill in a prison hospital, serving time for
an unrelated offense. Dallas prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss his case.
On Dec. 28, 1977, out of prison by then, he was shot to death by police in
a drug raid.

Garrett, who was freed pending his date in court, went on trial Feb. 9,
1970. Three days later, an all-white jury briefly deliberated and found him
guilty of heroin possession.

In Texas, possessing any one of a long list of drugs, from marijuana to
heroin, regardless of amount, was punishable by a minimum of two years in
prison and up to life. Because the judge in Garrett's case was new to the
bench and had been a hard-nosed prosecutor for seven years, Garrett and his
lawyer, now deceased, opted for jury sentencing.

Watching the jurors file out to deliberate, Garrett said, "I had an eerie
feeling things weren't going to turn out all right." He was free on $1,500
bail. On the spur of the moment, he said, he decided to flee. He was miles
away when the jury, unaware he had left, came back with its decision: life.

How times change.

As the counterculture flowered, with marijuana use more prevalent and open,
antiquated drug laws across the country came under attack in the late
1960s. Texas legislators began planning an overhaul of drug statutes
and--nine months after Garrett's trial--drug law reform was a major issue
in state elections.

A new set of Texas drug laws, effective in 1973, included graduated
penalties for possession based on weight and type of drug. Other states
enacted similar changes. Congress passed graduated penalties for federal
courts and gave judges new sentencing discretion. And the Nixon
administration, attacking drug use as a health problem, poured money into
treatment programs, which were scarcely available at the time.

Even after drug laws were stiffened in the 1980s amid the crack cocaine
scourge, even after federal judges lost much of their punishment discretion
and attention shifted from rehabilitation back to enforcement, graduated
sentences and treatment options largely remained in state courts. The
penalty in Texas today for a nonviolent drug user with 2 grams of heroin
and no prior convictions: potentially up to 10 years in prison, lawyers
said, but most likely a suspended sentence, probation and mandatory treatment.

Garrett said he took care of his own rehabilitation.

A week after leaving the courthouse, he said, he arrived in California, the
first of several states where he would live and work over the years. With
help from a woman he met in a Los Angeles bus station, he said, he kicked
heroin, got a Social Security card under the name Kowl Emil Williams and
found a job in construction. Authorities said there is no evidence he
committed any crimes as a fugitive.

"It took me, I imagine, about six weeks," he said of his withdrawal. "I was
throwing up, had the chills, the shakes. Can't sleep, can't eat. . . .

"But I got better," he said. "And at that time there is when I promised God
I wouldn't ever use again."