Clinton Frees Man With Mandatory Sentence

Billy Langston, who spent nearly eight years in prison for what some believe was a minor drug offense, always seems to both laugh and cry on important days in his life.

When he was sentenced for conspiracy to manufacture PCP on Aug. 29, 1994, he giggled nervously because he thought the judge said 360 days. When Langston, a first-time drug offender, realized the judge had said 360 months, he started to weep.

The pattern of laughter and tears continued Saturday after Langston was pardoned by President Clinton. After joyously swinging his 11-year-old son high in the air, Langston dabbed at his eyes with a wrinkled tissue.

“It’s been too long,” the 46-year-old Los Angeles man said.

Langston’s imprisonment had become a symbol for advocacy groups against mandatory federal sentencing standards. Many of them believed the final days of Clinton’s term marked the last, best chance for prisoners such as Langston, who were seeking pardons before President Bush took office Saturday.

“I don’t think tomorrow or a week from now there’s a good chance of stuff like this happening,” said Langston’s lawyer, Burke Kappler, who had taken Langston’s case for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a nonprofit group.

Although his pardon had been rumored for weeks, Langston spent Friday night staring at his cell ceiling and wondering what the president was doing.

“I was so nervous. I know [Clinton] had a lot of personal stuff to take care of and I was just watching CNN, hoping he signed my petition,” Langston said.

He went home to his aunt’s faded pink stucco home near Hyde Park, where family members gathered to greet him.

Langston said he “thought it was a joke” when the Terminal Island Federal Prison warden approached him about 9 a.m. and told him he was a free man.

It was only after Langston said goodbye to other inmates and rode away in a cab that he realized he wasn’t going back.

“It was a sweet day,” he said.

Langston was arrested in 1993 while driving back from San Francisco, where he had picked up enough chemicals to make more than 140 pounds of the drug PCP. Langston was between jobs at the time and was paid $1,000 to carry the chemicals to Los Angeles.

Langston, who said he had never manufactured PCP and didn’t purchase the chemicals, did not believe he was at risk for arrest “because you could get the chemicals over the counter,” he said.

Although Langston never claimed he was innocent, he did not think he would get a stiff sentence for what he believes is a relatively minor offense. But, under federal law, where sentences are determined by the quantity of drugs and past offenses, Langston received a 30-year sentence.

He had been convicted of a DUI early in the 1990s.

Judge David Kenyon, who later reduced the sentence to 22 years, was troubled by the stiff term, saying: “There is no question that this is an unjust, unfair sentence. . . . I think that this is a shameful thing that we’ve come to this.”

Langston, still wearing a prison-issue gray sweatshirt when he arrived at his aunt’s, admitted that he had been angry after the trial, primarily because another man in the car received a lighter sentence in a plea agreement.

But jail counseling helped him gain perspective, he said. Langston, who admits to having used cocaine and marijuana, also entered a drug rehabilitation program and knocked a year off his sentence.

“I kept fighting,” he said.

Although he unsuccessfully appealed his case once, he kept researching legal avenues and wrote to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The group took up his case because it was representative of so many others.

“There are a thousand Billy Langstons in prison today who are first-time offenders and don’t deserve sentences designed for kingpins,” said Julie Steward, president of the group.

Although Saturday was a good day for her organization, Steward said stiff federal sentencing laws are still a problem.

“Today was just a wonderful blip on the radar screen,” she said.

Though Langston said federal sentencing laws should be changed and that he plans to work with the families group, his thoughts Saturday were on his own family. While his son Martell gamely answered questions from reporters, the emotions of the day overcame him and he started to cry, burying his head in his father’s stomach.

“It’s all right now,” Langston said gently, patting his son’s thin back. “I’m back.”