COURT RULES GUN USE IN DRUG CRIMES MEANS ADDED 5 YEARS

WASHINGTON -- People convicted of possessing a gun while selling
drugs are subject to five-year mandatory minimum sentences on top of
most of other sentences, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The ruling was the first signed decision of the term, and it was
unanimous. But the court's newest member, Justice Elena Kagan, did
not participate, having disqualified herself in light of her work as
United States solicitor general.

The decision involved two defendants whose cases had been
consolidated. One of them, Kevin Abbott of Philadelphia, was
convicted of drug trafficking, of a related gun charge with the
5-year minimum and under a law requiring a 15-year minimum sentence
for career criminals. Only the latter two charges figured in his
sentence, and the trial judge added them together for a total of 20 years.

The second defendant, Carlos R. Gould of Wichita Falls, Tex., pleaded
guilty to a drug charge involving cocaine with a 10-year minimum
sentence and the related gun charge with a 5-year minimum. The trial
court gave him a little more than the minimum on the drug charge --
11 years and 5 months -- and then added five years for the gun charge.

The question in the case was what Congress meant when it revised a
1968 federal gun control law in 1998 by, among other things, adding a
new preface saying the five-year minimum for having or using guns
while selling drugs applied "except to the extent that a greater
minimum sentence is otherwise provided."

Mr. Abbott argued that his 15-year-sentence for being a career
criminal was such a greater minimum sentence and that it should
cancel out the additional five years for the gun charge. Mr. Gould
said the same thing about his 10-year sentence.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, said the
defendants' approach, which also relied on federal sentencing
guidelines, might make sense as a matter of policy.

"We do not gainsay that Abbott and Gould project a rational, less
harsh, mode of sentencing," she wrote. "But we do not think it was
the mode Congress ordered."

It was implausible, Justice Ginsburg wrote, to think Congress had
altered the law in 1998 in the direction of leniency. All Congress
meant to say in 1998 was that defendants subject to a mandatory
minimum sentence of more than five years for a particular crime --
that of having or using a gun in connection with a drug crime -- need
only serve the longer sentence.

Congress did not mean to say, Justice Ginsburg went on, that any
longer minimum sentence for unrelated crimes also canceled out the
five-year gun sentence.

"We doubt that Congress meant a prefatory clause, added in a bill
dubbed 'an act to throttle criminal use of guns,' to effect a
departure so great from" the 1968 law's purpose, she wrote. That
purpose, she said, was "insistence that sentencing judges impose
additional punishment."

Indeed, she wrote, a broader reading of the disputed words could
result in "sentencing anomalies," including the possibility that "the
worst offenders would often secure the shortest sentences."