APPEALS COURT REINSTATES LIFE SENTENCE

DENVER -- An appeals court Tuesday handed prosecutors a victory by
reversing a judge in Oklahoma City who reduced a drug dealer's sentence of
life in prison to a 20-year sentence. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals ordered the life sentence of Clarence Lee Green reinstated as the
result of an appeal by the U.S. attorney's staff in Oklahoma City.

Green and 17 others were indicted in 1996, accused of bringing large
quantities of cocaine from California to Oklahoma where it was converted to
crack cocaine and sold. The gang was known as the Main Street Mafia Crips.

Green was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy and to lesser
concurrent sentences for related crimes. Representing himself without an
attorney, he later challenged the constitutionality of the sentence.

He argued that the trial judge erred by not requiring prosecutors to prove
beyond a reasonable doubt the quantity of drugs involved. That
determination, Green said, was necessary to justify the life sentence.
Instead, the judge set the length of the sentence by making a finding of
the drug quantity by a preponderance of the evidence, a lesser legal standard.

Last year, a judge in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City agreed with
Green and reduced the sentence.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Leslie Maye said Tuesday she did not remember which
judge granted the reduction she appealed. The appeals court staff said
records show it was Judge Wayne Alley.

The appellate judges concluded 3-0 the proper sentence for all of Green's
convictions is 173 years in prison.

"A 173-year sentence is the functional equivalent to life imprisonment for
a 37-year-old person," they wrote in an 11-page decision.