Not to put any pressure on President Trump and his new buddy Kim Kardashian, but if he is going to start letting drug dealers out of prison, he’ll need some extra pardon pens.
The president this week, after listening to a plea from Kardashian when she visited the White House, commuted the sentence of a 63-year-old woman who was heavily involved in a Memphis-based cocaine trafficking operation.
She had been indicted in 1994 and ordered to spend life in prison in 1996 under federal sentencing guidelines. In this particular case, prosecutors opposed a lesser sentence because of the amount of drugs involved.
Most everyone is a soft touch for a crime story with a positive ending. As you can imagine, the prisoner, Alice Marie Johnson, is exceptionally grateful for her release. She was a model prisoner during her two decades behind bars. She thanked Kardashian for her help and promised she would not let Trump down.
Obviously, there are few drug convicts who have a celebrity sticking up for them — not to mention a president who’s very good at generating headlines by doing unexpected things.
And given that Trump in the past has called for the execution of drug dealers, it’s fun to imagine how he would have reacted if one of his predecessors had made such a decision.
But the larger point of the case is this: If Johnson deserved her freedom, it follows that the federal drug-sentencing guidelines of the 1990s that allowed someone convicted of a non-violent crime to be given a life sentence were too strict. If she got a raw deal, how many other people in federal prison for life did too?
The Washington Post’s online Wonkblog may not have a specific answer to that question, but it does have some interesting numbers about life sentences.
According to The Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice reform group, 30 percent of the 6,720 federal inmates in prison for life or for 50 years were convicted of drug cases. The specific number of drug inmates is 2,010. How many of these people have a background like Johnson, in which they made a serious mistake — but not one that deserves a life sentence?
It’s easy to make a case for leniency. Drug offenders in federal court can be sentenced to life for trafficking in just 2.2 pounds of heroin, 1.1 pound of methamphetamine mixture or half a pound of crack cocaine. That’s simply too harsh, and anybody sentenced to life on those relatively small amounts hardly qualifies as a big-time drug dealer.
The Sentencing Project also reports that federal life sentences are a pittance compared to state prison systems. Almost 200,000 state prisoners are serving life or 50-year sentences, but only 5,300 of those are for drug offenses.
None of this is to argue that everybody serving a life sentence for drug activity ought to be pardoned. But Trump’s action this week opened the door for a review of these cases. There have got to be plenty more Alice Marie Johnsons who deserve a second chance.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
