Supreme Court Weighs Strict Anti-Drug Laws : Crime: A man received a life sentence for cocaine possession. The case will test whether the justices will put limits on states’ tougher statutes.

The Supreme Court began considering Monday whether life in prison is cruel and unusual punishment for a former Air Force officer convicted of carrying a pound and a half of cocaine in his car trunk.

The case involving 45-year-old Ronald A. Harmelin will test whether the Supreme Court will put any constitutional limits on the new wave of strict anti-drug laws.

Justices clashed sharply, but the conservative members, who hold the majority, questioned whether any penalty short of death should be considered cruel and unusual.

Harmelin was convicted under a 1978 Michigan law, the nation’s harshest, designed to punish drug kingpins by imposing mandatory life prison sentences on anyone possessing a large amount of an illegal drug.

“Why isn’t the legislature entitled to say: ‘By George, we’re going to put a stop to this?’ Why is that wrong?” asked Justice Antonin Scalia.

Carla Johnson, Harmelin’s attorney, responded it is wrong because the penalty is grossly out of proportion to the crime.

She described Harmelin, a first-time offender, as a “mule” who carried drugs for others, but not a big-time drug dealer or seller. If he had been convicted of a violent crime such as aggravated assault, she said, his prison term would have been 10 years or less.

So far, 123 persons have been sentenced to life terms in Michigan for possessing more than 650 grams of cocaine or another illegal drug.

The convicts include a 50-year-old grandmother who picked up a suitcase full of cocaine at a Lansing airport. But Johnson argued that true big-time drug kingpins have largely escaped conviction and punishment.

Michigan prosecutor Richard Thompson conceded, with some pride, that the state law is “unusual.”

“We have the toughest penalty in the nation for this crime,” he told the court.

Under stricter new federal sentencing rules, Harmelin would have received a maximum 10-year prison term for the same crime. In California, his maximum sentence would have been three years, according to a compilation of drug laws filed with the court.

With one exception, the Supreme Court has applied the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment only in death penalty cases, not to review prison sentences.

The exception came in 1983, when the court on a 5-4 vote threw out a life sentence given to a South Dakota man who had cashed bad checks on several occasions.

Johnson had cited that case, Solem vs. Helm. But Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist suggested the high court’s decision reducing the man’s sentence was wrong.

Harmelin’s attorney countered that the Michigan law is similar to a death sentence.

“Mandatory life in prison is the equivalent of death in prison,” she said.

Through most of the hour, Justices Scalia, Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, David H. Souter and Anthony M. Kennedy fired sharp questions at Harmelin’s attorney. They questioned whether the high court, rather than the state legislatures, should decide appropriate sentences for drug crimes.

On several occasions, the normally mild mannered Justice John Paul Stevens showed his irritation with the questions from his more conservative colleagues. The bow-tied Stevens interrupted at one point to supply an answer for Harmelin’s lawyer.

Scalia challenged Johnson’s suggestion that a mandatory life prison term can be compared to a death sentence because the convict dies in prison. Since a 20-year sentence for a 60-year-old defendant could also result in the convict’s dying in prison, why should a mandatory life term be considered different, he asked Johnson.

When she paused, groping for an answer, Stevens interjected: “It’s not very different, but only in the very rare case of your hypothetical.”

“That’s your answer?” Scalia asked the attorney.

“And an excellent one,” she replied, prompting an outburst of laughter.