LONG TERM IN DRUG CASE FUELS DEBATE ON SENTENCING

Weldon H. Angelos, a 25-year-old producer of rap records, will be sentenced
Tuesday in federal court in Salt Lake City for selling several hundred
dollars in marijuana on each of three occasions, his first offenses. He
faces 63 years in prison.

Laws that set mandatory minimum sentences require 55 of the 63 years
because Mr. Angelos carried a gun while he sold the drugs.

"It would appear effectively to be a life sentence," the judge, Paul G.
Cassell of Federal District Court there, wrote in a request to the
prosecution and the defense for advice about whether he has any choice but
to send the man to prison forever.

Judge Cassell, a brainy, conservative former law professor, surveyed the
maximum sentences for other federal crimes. Hijacking an airplane: 25
years. Terrorist bombing intending to kill a bystander: 20 years.
Second-degree murder: 14 years. Kidnapping: 13 years. Rape of a
10-year-old: 11 years.

He noted that Mr. Angelos would face a far shorter sentence in the courts
of any state. In Utah, prosecutors estimate that he would receive five to
seven years.

The Angelos case may provide a glimpse of the future. The constitutionality
of federal sentencing guidelines was called into doubt by a Supreme Court
decision in June, but that thinking does not extend to laws that set
mandatory minimum sentences.

If the court strikes down the guidelines this fall, as many expect, judges
will have much greater discretion, to the dismay of many prosecutors and
politicians who worry that judges are not tough enough on crime.

Sentencing guidelines are set by the United States Sentencing Commission,
an agency of the judicial branch. The guidelines were intended to limit
judges' discretion without locking them into one-size-fits-all sentences.
Mandatory minimums, in contrast, are enacted by Congress and are part of
the criminal code.

"The guidelines always have some sort of escape," said Jeffrey B. Sklaroff
of the New York office of Greenberg Traurig, a law firm that represents 29
former judges and prosecutors who filed a brief in support of Mr. Angelos
in July. "A mandatory minimum means what it says: it is mandatory, and it
is a minimum."

In Mr. Angelos's case, the drug offenses and related money-laundering
convictions, for using drug money to buy a car and pay his rent, could
subject him to eight years in prison. The mandatory minimums are for the
additional offense of carrying a gun while selling drugs. Mr. Angelos
carried a Glock pistol in an ankle holster when he sold marijuana on two
occasions, though he did not brandish or use it. More guns were found in a
briefcase and a safe at his home.

According to the indictment, some of the guns were stolen, though Mr.
Angelos was not accused of being the thief. Judge Cassell is required to
add five years for the gun in the first deal and 25 years each for the
second deal and the guns found at his home.

The Supreme Court will decide whether to strike down the sentencing
guidelines after it hears arguments in October, and some legislators are
already signaling their preference for more mandatory minimums if the
guidelines are deemed unconstitutional.

At a hearing in July on legislation that would increase drug sentences,
Representative Howard Coble, Republican of North Carolina, said, "It seems
clear that mandatory minimums may well take on added importance in assuring
appropriate sentences for serious federal crimes as a result of the Supreme
Court's actions."

Ronald H. Weich, a former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee who
opposes mandatory minimums, said they had a political constituency. "There
is a real danger," Mr. Weich said, "that we're heading back to mandatory
minimums if guidelines are unconstitutional."

The Justice Department supports mandatory minimums, said Monica Goodling, a
spokeswoman.

"Tough but fair mandatory minimum sentences take habitual lawbreakers off
the streets, lock up the most dangerous criminals and help ensure the
safety of law-abiding Americans," Ms. Goodling said. "Since these
common-sense policies were created, we've seen crime plummet to a 30-year
low. The public, the Congress and presidents of both parties have supported
mandatory minimums for a simple reason - they work."

In June, just days after the Supreme Court's decision in Blakely v.
Washington, which struck down the sentencing system of Washington State,
Judge Cassell was the first judge to say the logic of the decision required
the voiding of the federal sentencing guidelines as well. In the Angelos
case, he wrote that he took "no joy" in the "potentially cataclysmic
implications" of that reasoning.

In Blakely, the Supreme Court held that all facts that could lead to longer
sentences must be found by a jury. But the Washington law, like the federal
guidelines, let judges make some such findings.

"There has not been a single case in the history of American criminal law
with the immediate impact of this one," Frank O. Bowman, an Indiana
University expert in sentencing law, said of Blakely. "The United States
Supreme Court has essentially shut down the criminal justice system or at
least put it in a state of suspended animation."

Still, whatever the Supreme Court decides about how Blakely applies to the
federal guidelines, cases like Mr. Angelos's will not be directly affected,
for two reasons: a jury did find the facts about the guns he possessed, and
another Supreme Court case says judges may find the facts supporting
minimum sentences.

Mr. Angelos's lawyers and the 29 former judges and prosecutors argue that
the mandatory sentence in his case amounts to a cruel and unusual
punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. The Supreme Court has not
been receptive to similar arguments in cases involving three-strikes laws
and a first-time offender given life without parole for large-scale cocaine
distribution.

However, Judge Cassell has drawn a distinction in his academic work between
the guidelines and mandatory minimums. In a Stanford Law Review article in
April, he wrote that "the federal sentencing guidelines, while tough, are
not 'too' tough." But mandatory minimums, he wrote, "can lead to possible
injustices."

In court papers, prosecutors said Mr. Angelos "trafficked in hundreds of
pounds of high-grade marijuana," "distributed cocaine and synthetic
narcotics" and "affiliated himself with a violent street gang." These
assertions, however, were not proved to a jury.

Last year, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court
told the American Bar Association that "in too many cases, mandatory
minimum sentences are unwise and unjust." The association appointed a
commission, which recently issued a report urging the abolition of such
sentencing.

"There are real economic and human costs," said Douglas A. Berman, an Ohio
State University expert on sentencing law, "to putting everyone away for as
long as humanly possible."

Melodie Rydalch, a spokeswoman for Paul M. Warner, the United States
attorney in Salt Lake City, said his office had no comment on the Angelos
case. In general, Ms. Rydalch said, "we will continue to enforce mandatory
minimums so long as Congress tells us to."