cannabisnews.com: Kemba Smith Granted The Gift Of Freedom 





Kemba Smith Granted The Gift Of Freedom 
Posted by FoM on December 22, 2000 at 21:43:19 PT
By Libby Copeland, Washington Post Staff Writer
Source: Washington Post
Yesterday was momentous for the Smith family. Kemba Smith was released from prison, where she'd been held for more than six years. She was granted clemency -- the last hope she had pinned everything on. She was to return, finally: to her parents' house outside Richmond; to her 6-year-old son, who has never known her as a free person; and to an unlikely celebrity.
"President Clinton's commutation of Kemba's sentence answers our prayers -- nearly seven years of prayers, which seem like an eternity," said the parents, Gus and Odessa Smith, in a statement.Kemba Smith stood -- and stands -- for a lot of things now, one day after Clinton officially commuted her sentence of 241/2 years, which she spent mainly at a federal prison in Danbury, Conn. For one, she stands for the controversy surrounding federal drug sentencing laws passed in the '80s: Smith was a fringe player in a crack cocaine ring -- a first-time, nonviolent offender -- whose penalties were greater than the average state sentence for murder or voluntary manslaughter.Smith also stands as testament to the wreckage that physical abuse can make of a young life. It was her boyfriend's abuse, she has said, that made her afraid to leave their life of crime. She has changed a great deal during her time in prison. There are still glimmers of the teenager she once was -- naive, sheltered -- but a certain toughness overshadows it now. She is 29 going on 50.Kemba Smith was one of 62 prisoners granted clemency yesterday, just in time for Christmas. A lame-duck president must not seem so ineffectual to her. For years, her parents had tried nearly every avenue available. Numerous appeals and civil motions, along with a substantial grass-roots campaign, left them with no relief, desperate and twice bankrupted. In between speeches at universities, visits to Connecticut and raising Kemba's son, Armani, they prayed. Odessa Smith cried a great deal. Earlier this year, they filed a request for clemency with the help of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, which has been working on the case pro bono since 1996. Early yesterday morning, an attorney from the Legal Defense Fund came to Danbury to meet with Smith. The first buzz about her pending release hit the news around noon, and Gus Smith, reached at home, said simply, "We're hoping and praying." The commutation came through later in the afternoon, and prison officials began processing paperwork. At 5:29, Smith was officially released.At the turn of the last decade, Smith -- the middle-class only daughter of a school teacher and an accountant -- was a sophomore at Hampton University in Virginia when she became involved in a relationship with a man nine years her senior. Jamaican-born Peter Hall turned out to be a drug dealer who used young women as drug-carrying mules in a murderous East Coast crack ring. But this information came gradually to Smith, as did her descent into fear, as Hall became increasingly abusive.A low-level participant in Hall's circle, Smith helped him in a number of ways, bailing him out of jail and carrying money for him, and even keeping a gun in her purse. And when push finally came to shove in the autumn of '94, Smith -- reluctant to bargain information for a likely reduction in her sentence -- wound up being charged with trafficking 255 kilograms of crack cocaine. She never actually sold any drugs. About the same time, Hall was murdered.Drug law reform groups crowed yesterday that mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines are facing increasing scrutiny. Dorothy Gaines of Mobile, Ala., a low-level drug offender carrying a weighty sentence of 19 years, was also granted clemency yesterday. The plights of Gaines and Smith have been heavily publicized."Kemba Smith is not the drug kingpin type that Congress intended to target when it passed the federal mandatory minimums," said Laura Sager, executive director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "Like thousands of other low-level drug offenders, she may have deserved some punishment but she received a disproportionately harsh sentence for her role in the drug trade."A judge who rejected one of Smith's appeals in October '99 wrote that her prison sentence was "truly heavy" and represented one of the "unintended consequences" of congressional legislation. He said he could do nothing, but recommended that Smith apply for clemency.Yesterday, that advice bore fruit. Now, Smith starts the long process of becoming free. "They've got a lot of rebuilding to do," said veteran journalist Reginald Stuart, who broke Smith's story for the now-defunct Emerge magazine in 1996 and has stayed close to the Smiths. "I will visit sometime soon and meet the Smith family -- because I met Kemba Smith and I met her parents, but I never met the Smith family."Citing their need for privacy, a spokeswoman for Smith said she and her family would not be speaking to the media. But in her statement, she said, "Since I was incarcerated in September, 1994 . . . I have dreamed of the opportunity to be an everyday parent."Now that begins.Source: Washington Post (DC) Author: Libby Copeland, Washington Post Staff WriterPublished: Saturday, December 23, 2000Address: 1150 15th Street NorthwestWashington, DC 20071Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company Contact: letterstoed washpost.comWebsite: http://www.washingtonpost.com/Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Related Articles & Web Sites:November Coalition http://www.november.org/Criminal Justice Policy Foundationhttp://www.cjpf.org/Families Against Mandatory Minimumshttp://www.famm.org/Coalition for Jubilee Clemencyhttp://www.cjpf.org/clemencyClergy Asks Clinton for a Final Acthttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread8099.shtmlClinton Grants Pardons To 59 Peoplehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread8098.shtmlPraying for Christmas Clemencyhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread8094.shtml
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Comment #6 posted by Lehder on December 23, 2000 at 09:46:42 PT
gift of freedom?
Freedom, according to our social charter, is comprised of certain "inalienable rights" - but these are only words on hemp paper. Freedom today is a "gift" bestowed at the capricious pleasure drug warriors.
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Comment #5 posted by Lehder on December 23, 2000 at 09:10:42 PT
bright side?
My reading, especially of Hannah Arendt, tells that a totalitarian movement, once its nails have dug irreversibly into the medulla, ends with the political and economic collapse of the host society. Like a suicidal terrorist hijacker, like a raging Hitler urging his last followers to their own destruction during the invasion of Berlin, a totalitarian movement complements its own denoument with the widest possible destruction of the subverted civilization.The communist witch hunts of the early fifties ended suddenly when Joe McCarthy, naive of the power of then novel TV broadcasting, ranted like a mad drug warrior before a stunned national audience about the plots of secret communists. An astonished citizenry, once seeing McCarthy in black and white for a propagandist and demagogue, literally laughed him out of power overnight. But McCarthy had enjoyed power for only a few years, and his movement had not made the extensive penetrations of social, economic and political institutions that the war on drugs has effected after many decades of perfidy. The present totalitarian movement also is master of the arts of television propaganda, lies contrived by a formula that indicts any critic or doubter as an enemy of America. Despite occasional false rays of hope like this miniscule and gruging release of prisoners, the war on drugs will strengthen until it has totally enslaved, brainwashed and destroyed America and then the world, or until Dan Rather tells us that it's wrong. "It's the icy fingers of a barbarian clutching your shoulder."
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Comment #4 posted by dddd on December 23, 2000 at 06:49:11 PT
I admit
 It's true Ripper....the years have taken their toll,,and seasoned me into a sortof old,bitter hippie.I agree,their is a definite bright side that should not be ignored,,but someone has to represent the pessimistic,upset hothead side here...........................dddd
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Comment #3 posted by ripper on December 23, 2000 at 05:47:04 PT
Look at the bright side.
 Come on dddd! Its not what we are looking for, but its good news just the same. Try to see the good in this and not just the bad. Anything at all is a start. A few key bricks taken out and the wall comes crumbling down. Or at least starts to fall. I agree that he could do more, a lot more, and that some who got out should not have. This is a good sign that drug offenders are getting out. It shows where the drug war is headed, and the problems it has caused. Smoke a hooter and reflect a little on the freedom that has been givin. The familys involved, I'm sure, think this is a gift from God, not Bill.  I'm not trying to dog you, as I like your posts. It just seems that you don't see the good in this.  
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Comment #2 posted by dddd on December 23, 2000 at 03:40:32 PT
furthermore
 To call this a "gift of freedom",is really a sick and distorted way to describe it...It's kind of like if you kidnapped someones child,and years later felt too guilty to live with yourself,,so you decided to return the child to their parents....To return something that you STOLD,is nowhere close to being a "gift". It also seems to me,that this is the equivelent of the government admitting that it could be held liable for damages,in unjustly ruining thousands of lives. The real insult outrage,is that Clinton released a bunch of real political crooks at the same time,which gives the appearance that the real crooks somehow have something in common with people like Kendra Smith..................................DdDd
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Comment #1 posted by dddd on December 23, 2000 at 03:25:36 PT
absurd
 I hate to hate people,but I cant help bet hate the pompous,arrogant shitheads on capital hill who have basicly ignored the egrigious injustice of these absurd laws.I consider them somewhat responsible,and to blame for people like Kemba Smith,whose life they allowed to be ruined. Irresponsive,and irresponsible lawmakers should be the ones subject to mandatory minimums,and all the others,who have stood by and watched all this,should be charged with conspiracy. This shit really pisses me off bigtime
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