SOME JUSTICE, BUT NOT FOR ALL

Amy Pofahl got a raw deal. In 1989, her estranged husband Charles
Frederick "Sandy" Pofahl was arrested for drug trafficking in Germany.
She helped round up ill-gotten money to help her husband make bail -
which was a crime. Thanks to draconian federal drug laws and
prosecutorial madness, her kingpin husband, who cooperated with
prosecutors, served, no time in federal prison; the Feds cut a deal
that gave him credit for some four years he served behind German Vars.
Amy Pofahl was sentenced to 24 years.

Amy admits to wrongdoing, but in her wildest dreams, she never thought
that in America she could receive such a harsh sentence, or that she
could face decades in prison while her reputed drug-dealer husband
went free. She said, "I think he should have got my sentence and I
should have got his."

Last week, Pofahl got her first taste of justice in years when
President Clinton pardoned Pofahl and four other federal drug
offenders. The Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin, Calif.,
released Pofahl on Friday after she had serve nine years and three
months of her sentence. "I lost my entire 30s to the system," Pofahl,
now 40, said from San Francisco International Airport on Sunday as she
prepared to fly to her family in Arkansas.

Her release was bittersweet, she said, because "I had to leave so many
people behind who are in the same situation," She was referring to
young women whom federal courts have sentenced to obscenely long
sentences, while their drug-dealer husbands or boyfriends -have done
little or no time in exchange for testifying against smaller fish in
the drug pond.

American University law professor Margaret C. Love is "delighted" over
the news. The pardon attorney for the Justice Department from 1990 to
1997, Love had pushed the administration to use presidential pardons
to free inmates from draconian terms, but with little success.

As National journal writer Stuart Taylor noted last year after the
president freed 12 members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN,
Clinton was "stingier than any other president in the past century"
when it came to pardons. Clemency acceptance has fallen from a high of
40.9 percent - most of which entail pardons for convicts who served
their time - under President Kennedy to 21.6 percent (President
Carter) to 12.6 percent (Reagan) to 4.2 percent (Bush) to 3.4 percent
for Clinton as, of March 31, 1999.

According to the Justice Department, this administration has freed
only 21 convicts. That means Clinton has freed more terrorists than
nonviolent drug offenders.

He's at his weakest when draconian sentencing laws should compel him
to be strong. It used to be a criminal's wife enjoyed spousal
immunity. Federal prosecutors now get around that immunity by charging
spouses and honeys for conspiracy, which allows them to charge a wife
not for any criminal act she committed, but for all the crimes her man
committed. When a kingpin rolls and his woman doesn't, conspiracy
means that the woman is responsible for everything the dealer did,
while he is responsible for none of it.

Professor Love hopes the pardons will provide "a signal to federal
prosecutors, to federal judges, to the Congress. I think it's a signal
to everybody" that the laws and their application need rehauling.

Monica Pratt of Families Against Mandatory Minimums: wants more. She
noted, "Without addressing the drug policies that lead to these human
tragedies, this is little more than selective altruism."

Make that selective altruism in, the face of massive cruelty and
injustice.