In Many Drug Cases, Normal Clemency Process Bypassed

Mayor Ross Anderson of Salt Lake City was packed with thousands of others on the west lawn of the Capitol, watching in the light rain as George W. Bush’s inauguration officially ended Bill Clinton’s eight years in office.

But Anderson was preoccupied, trying desperately to get his cell phone to work. With the circuits jammed, he could not get a call out to Mickey Ibarra, Clinton’s director of intergovernmental affairs.

The mayor was eager for news on whether Cory Stringfellow, the 31-year-old son of friends, had received a presidential commutation. Anderson had been part of an intense lobbying campaign, led by two U.S. senators, a congressman and a court reform group, to persuade Clinton to free convicted drug offender Stringfellow.

Only after the ceremony was over and Anderson and the crowd began moving out of the rain toward Union Station did he finally get through to Ibarra. The news was joyous. “I was thrilled,” the mayor said.

Like Carlos Vignali, a convicted drug dealer from Los Angeles, Cory Stringfellow was one of the lucky ones. Also like Vignali, Stringfellow had served about six years of a lengthy sentence.

The two men were among 21 drug offenders released from prison in January by presidential order--freed because of Clinton’s determination to telegraph his disapproval of unyielding sentencing guidelines that have left many minor drug convicts languishing in prison.

At first glance, the Vignali clemency seems a case apart from the other commutations, an abuse of political influence and money that proves a controversial exception to a more legitimate rule.

Indeed, some of the last-minute commutations granted by Clinton do meet his standard of clemencies that were deserved.

But an examination of other cases reveals some of the same hallmarks of the Vignali case--intense lobbying by influential community leaders, behind-the-scenes intervention in the process, and a failure to notify prosecutors that clemency was being seriously considered.

As his hold on the White House slowly wound down, Clinton had been unusually outspoken in his comments about reforming federal sentencing guidelines that force judges to issue mandatory minimum prison terms that often are lengthy.

The outgoing president said he believed it unfair for so many men and women--some estimate the number is in the tens of thousands in federal and state prisons--to spend so much time behind bars for mistakes they made in their youths.

“We should be granting more pardons,” Clinton told the Christian Science Monitor last year. “. . . not so much to wipe away the past as to free people up to live in the present and the future.”

In Clinton’s final days at the White House, his top staffers were besieged with requests for clemencies--from individuals, from Clinton friends, contributors and politicians, and from a little-known, Washington-based nonprofit organization known as FAMM, the Families Against Mandatory Minimums Foundation.

The group submitted memos to both the White House and the Justice Department on behalf of commutations for 24 individuals.

In the end, of the 21 drug commutations granted by Clinton, the group had pitched 17 of them to White House staffers and the pardon attorney’s office.

Vignali was not one of the group’s cases. The Vignali application worked its own way through the system, with the help of Clinton brother-in-law Hugh Rodham, who was working for a $204,280 fee, and the support of a number of Southern California officeholders.

Ultimately, Clinton granted the Vignali commutation even though the Justice Department recommended that it be denied. On the day Clinton left the White House, Vignali walked out of prison a free man.

Julia Stewart, FAMM president, said that although she is grateful that Clinton accepted 17 of her cases, she is nevertheless disheartened over the Vignali matter and the furor it has caused.

“It’s going to make it harder for others now,” she said. “It’s not just Vignali. It’s [former fugitive financier Marc] Rich and everybody else” who gained clemency by circumventing the standard process.

But many of the drug cases that Stewart supported, such as Stringfellow’s, also came from outside the normal system.

Some applicants, like Stringfellow and Vignali, benefited from the help of elected officials. Some commutations, again like Stringfellow’s, were granted without input from prosecutors. Had they been asked to weigh in by the Justice Department, as is the normal process, many of the prosecutors would have recommended denial.

Cory Stringfellow was a high school dropout who went to work at his father’s accounting firm. By age 22, he was experimenting with LSD; he eventually sold 5,200 doses of the drug to a friend who, in turn, sold it to an undercover drug agent.

Guilty of conspiracy to possess and distribute LSD, Stringfellow suddenly fled. He was not captured for 18 months, when he finally surrendered in England. Authorities brought him back to Salt Lake City. But because he had fled, his original plea agreement was thrown out and his sentence was more than doubled to 16 years.

Several years ago, Anderson met Stringfellow’s parents, who were working with the FAMM group against harsh prison sentences. He later spoke at a FAMM conference in Salt Lake City, and then began working his channels to garner more support for the young man.

The long, mandatory sentences are “just an obvious injustice to people, most of whom were very young when they committed a nonviolent offense,” the mayor said in an interview. “It’s not only incredibly unjust and wasteful, but disastrous to so many loved ones.”

A Democrat, Anderson began enlisting help, seeking out Utah Sen. Orrin G. Hatch and then-Sen. Robert F. Bennett, both Republicans, to telephone or write to the White House. Bennett wrote, Hatch called. He also got then-Rep. Merrill Cook, another Utah Republican, to lobby for Stringfellow.

Christopher Rosche, a spokesman for Hatch, said Anderson and FAMM “brought quite a lot of material to him” seeking his help on the Stringfellow case.

Roche said Hatch called because he “felt that because of [Stringfellow’s] age at the time of the crimes and the fact he had tried to turn his life around, it would be nice if his sentence could be commuted.”

Anderson did not stop there. He called Ibarra at the White House. He called White House Counsel Beth Nolan. “I asked her to please carefully review the file,” he said.

In late November, he wrote the president. The next month, when he shook Clinton’s hand at a U.S. Conference of Mayors’ meeting at the White House, he again expressed his concern about harsh prison terms for people like Stringfellow.

Then, just two days before Clinton’s term ended, Anderson called a press conference in Washington to drum up more support for the release of Stringfellow and others.

On Jan. 20, he got his wish. Until then, federal prosecutors in Salt Lake City were not even aware that Stringfellow had applied for clemency. They were aghast.

“No one ever called me,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Gregory C. Diamond. “Not the politicians or the mayor or the senators. I found out about this commutation through the newspaper.”

Had he been asked, Diamond said, he would have opposed an early release for Stringfellow because he fled to Europe. “He flouted the courts,” Diamond said. “He should have been given more time.”

(Clinton commuted Stringfellow’s sentence on the drug conviction only; he must remain in prison until May 20 on the extra time he got for fleeing the country.)

Other prosecutors around the country are equally upset that they were never given voices in the commutation process for some of the drug offenders they sent to prison.

Steve Cole in the U.S. attorney’s office in Tampa, Fla., said his office was surprised to learn that Donald R. Clark, who was sentenced to life for his role in a $30-million, high-grade marijuana ring, was suddenly free after less than 10 years in prison. “We were never contacted,” he said. “We never got anything on it. We like to see people serve their full sentence. And this was a pretty big marijuana trafficking case.”

Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia were also not consulted before Loretta Fish, 44, was released after serving six years of a 19-year, seven-month prison term for her involvement in a narcotics ring that brewed and sold methamphetamine.

“This office was not told anything,” said Mike Levy, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office there.

But Fish’s defenders argued that her sentence was excessive and that she was really just a minor player in the drug operation.

Upon her release, she criticized the federal sentencing rules. “I don’t believe the least culpable should be held the most accountable,” she told the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, Pa., last month.

Stringfellow, when he learned of his commutation, wrote a letter to the Salt Lake Tribune, thanking the mayor and the senators and all the others who helped his cause. He also asked: “Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?”

That question lingers in the minds of many who never sought or received clemency from Clinton, including Todd Hopson, a co-defendant in the Vignali case who remains locked up, serving 18 years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Rochester, Minn.

Hopson more closely fits the model that Clinton, FAMM and others have spoken of--a first-time offender, a minor role in the drug crime, and someone who does not have the money or connections to get out of prison early.

In a recent letter to The Times, Hopson wrote: “I just want to let the world know that I feel cheated.”