Kemba Smith's Hard Time

By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 13, 2000; Page F01 It's hard to explain things when you don't entirely understand them yourself, but that's what mothers do. And so, when the boy visits Danbury every couple of months, Kemba Smith experiences the toughest part about being a mother--explaining.

When he was 3, Kemba told her son she was on "timeout." "I hung around with the wrong crowd in school," she said. "I made mistakes."

But right around his fifth birthday last December, he began to get mixed up. All this talk about guns and drugs. He came up with the theory that Mommy shot someone.

At which point she cried, and then lifted him onto her lap--because you can do that in a minimum security federal prison--and explained that she never hurt anyone, but her boyfriend did, and that's the reason why she's here.

Tougher to answer the adults. In letters they ask her why she didn't leave the man who beat her. They ask her why she committed crimes. Tougher to answer, except to say the reasons seem intertwined.

The worst letter was the one that said, "I deserved what I got."

Twenty-four and a half years. That's what Kemba Smith got. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a cocaine ring, although she never sold or used the drugs. She pleaded guilty after covering and lying and breaking the law for her boyfriend, who was leading the drug ring, who was also pummeling her off and on for three years.

She pleaded guilty in a nation where the drug war is so intense that a low-level participant in a drug operation stands to lose as much as its kingpin. The severity of her sentence, called into question even by a judge who has turned down her appeals, is largely the result of a potent combination of mandatory minimums and federal sentencing guidelines.

And now, Kemba Smith, 28, sits in federal prison in Connecticut with 19 years to go on a sentence of 24 1/2 years. Twenty-four and a half. That's about four years more than the average state sentence for murder or voluntary manslaughter. That's at least 15 more years than the average state sentences for sexual assault, aggravated assault and robbery. That's hard time.

Kemba's story is the sinking trajectory of a young woman born to advantage and remarkable vulnerability in the suburbs of Richmond, who made a few flightless hops toward adolescent rebellion during college, and then found herself a man. He was, as it turned out, very much the wrong man. The way Kemba tells it, it was just a short slide from love to fear, and from fear to helping, running.

Here is an old photograph. Kemba sits beside her boyfriend, Peter Hall, on her parents' couch on Christmas Day, 1991. Kemba seems relaxed, her head cocked to the side. Peter--who looks far younger than his 28 years--is not quite smiling. When this picture was taken, Kemba's parents didn't yet know the rap on this young man, who had once choked their daughter till the blood vessels bloomed in her cheeks.

Now, nine years later, the family left behind--Kemba's mother and father, Kemba's 5-year-old son--sit in that same spot in the living room, looking over old photos.

"Why did you bring him in the house if he was a drug dealer?" Armani asks, of the man in the picture, who is also his father.

And that, of course, is the question that haunts them.

"We didn't know he was a drug dealer," Armani's grandfather says. "We didn't know."

Ever since her case was featured in a 1996 issue of Emerge magazine, Kemba Smith has been a cause celebre whose supporters--perhaps simplistically--proclaim her a blameless victim. Her parents crisscross the country, telling her story to anyone who might listen. On the Web site devoted to Kemba's cause, and in the speeches that her father gives, young women are warned that Kemba's misfortune could befall them, too, if they make the mistake of falling in love with the wrong guy.

But the truth of why Kemba Niambi Smith fell in love with Peter Michael Hall--and stayed, while he pulled her down with him--is more complicated than bad luck in love.

In high school, say Kemba's parents, Gus and Odessa Smith, their only child seemed well adjusted and obedient. She grew up in a protective middle-class home in Glen Allen, Va., the child of an accountant and a teacher. She was an unspectacular student, but loved playing flute in the band and singing in the church choir. She attended vacation Bible school, obeyed her parents' 8 p.m. curfew.

"My parents kind of like told me what to do and I always like did it," Kemba says. "I would be upset about it. . . . [But] I wanted to be, you know, the perfect daughter that my mom wanted me to be."

Having grown up in a mainly white environment with white friends, Kemba felt uncool and uneasy around her black peers. She wanted to get over it, so she decided to attend an all-black college.

But when she started in 1989 at Hampton University, a historically black college in Hampton, Va., Kemba says she was plagued by insecurity. Released from the strict and affectionate sphere of her home, Kemba was overwhelmed by her freedom and the competition to be "fly." She became friends with girls who smoked pot and copped attitudes, and she smoked and copped and tried to fit in. In summer courses before freshman year, she made B's. But when the fall term started, she let her grades go, and her parents anxiously watched her grade point average drift below 2.0. Something concerned them even more: Odessa found out that Kemba wanted birth control. The Smiths, concerned about Kemba's sexual activity, had her go to a few sessions with a psychologist.

But the influences at school would be far greater than anything that happened in the therapist's office. On that well-off campus, in that partyers' circle, folks aspired to be what one of Kemba's friends calls "ghetto fabulous"--driving high-class cars, wearing flashy jewelry, touting style and dough.

At a get-together the winter of sophomore year, at the age of 19, she met Peter Hall. He was going by "Khalif" then, one of at least six aliases he used. He was Jamaican and not a student himself. He had an edge, and Kemba liked it.

"Everybody seemed to become energetic and alive when he came around," Kemba says. Guys stood up to offer him a seat. Girls hustled into the kitchen to get him a beer. Only later would Kemba wonder if that seeming respect was really fear.

That night, Kemba was flattered to realize that Peter noticed her. He teased her about how her last name, Smith, a "white slave-master's name," clashed with her African-inspired names, Kemba Niambi. He said her hair made her look like Minnie Mouse.

She was smitten.

They began casually dating, having sex. Kemba thought of them as "friends." She rode in Peter's flashy cars--a Jeep Cherokee, a Sterling--saw his townhousestacked with expensive electronic equipment and modern furniture, and heard the buzz that Peter dealt drugs. She didn't ask questions. The fact that many popular college women were friendly with him made him seem safe.

Yet, by the time Kemba met him, Peter had been using the campus of Hampton as a base of a growing drug trade for two years. He was nearly 28. He and his brother, Wainsworth Marcellus "Unique" Hall, had established a drug circuit between New York and Virginia that authorities say would ultimately move $4 million in crack and powder cocaine, and cause at least two murders. Peter Hall had a felony conviction dating back to 1984.

As Kemba and Peter became closer, she says, she got the feeling he was trying to mold her. He said her parents had sheltered her, and he acted as if he were her instructor in the ways of the world. Perhaps this is why the first time he beat her, she twisted brutal violence into a lesson.

It was July after sophomore year, Kemba and Peter had known each other for five or six months, and she had gone with friends to a basketball game in Philadelphia. Peter was due to meet her there. After the game, a guy she'd recently met grabbed her hand flirtatiously, and she looked up to see Peter in the crowd, watching her.

That night, Peter asked her to come to his hotel room. He accused Kemba of being naive, and told her that the casual acquaintance was trying to have sex with her.

"He was just saying, 'Well, I'm gonna show you what would have happened to you,' " Kemba says. ". . . He straddled me on the bed and he started strangling me and hitting me at the same time. And I can just remember it going through my head that 'I'm gonna die.' "

She quit fighting when she realized that made it worse. When he stopped, Kemba's face was swollen and ruddy. One eye was bleeding--badly enough that she later went to a doctor and said she'd been in a car accident. Peter comforted her and told her not to be frightened of him, that he was only trying to teach her.

That night in his bed, she curled up in a fetal position, afraid to move.

The next day, Kemba says, "I was like, when I got home, I'm gonna tell somebody or I'm gonna tell the police. . . . But in between leaving that morning and getting back to Virginia, my whole thought processes changed because of the [consoling] way he was treating me and the way I was thinking that maybe it was my fault."

At 19, Kemba was only too ready to blame herself. She was insecure. She deferred easily. She trusted easily.

Occasionally, she says things even now that suggest how easy a victim she must have been. She mentions in passing that a guy she dated in college before Peter also hit her a few times. No big deal, she adds quickly.

"I mean, I never had like a mark or anything."

What made her this way? The blame, the blame. In the aftermath of Kemba's incarceration, blame showered everyone.

Was it something she learned from Odessa, who is emotionally fragile; who married the first man she fell for; who is, in her own words, "very trusting, very trusting"?

"Maybe if my mom had talked to me about relationships and how they should be," Kemba starts to say. "But I don't like to fault my mom."

Was it something about Gus, the one with ready answers, the firm disciplinarian who aimed to protect his only child from a big, bad world?

"First thing we asked: Where did we go wrong as parents?" Gus says. Then he speculates: "You focus so much on the positive that they're somewhat sheltered from the negative."

Kemba grew up in a household where the power structure was clearly defined. Her father made the decisions. Her mother believed his judgment was often better anyway. Gus never hit her, Odessa says, but there were "great moments of anger. . . .

"He is the type of man who would never hit me . . . but to push, to grab my arm or something like that, she has probably seen," Odessa says.

As Kemba grew up, she says she noticed her father learned to control his temper. Later, when she was dating Peter, she expected the same pattern: that Peter would get better, rather than worse.

By the fall of 1991, Kemba usually slept at Peter's off-campus apartment, taking his clothes to the laundry, cooking him dinners as she'd seen her mom do for her dad. He bought her clothes and jewelry. He had beaten her twice since the incident in Philadelphia--once when Kemba shook another man's hand goodbye, and again when she opened the door for another man.

If Kemba had any doubts about rumors that Peter was dealing, an incident in September 1991 erased them. Peter was arrested in Hampton on trespassing charges that revealed at least one previous outstanding drug charge.

During the four months Peter spent in prison, Kemba says, "he would write me letters saying how he was glad what happened happened and that he could start a clean slate." He seemed so kind and sincere at these moments, Kemba says, "I wanted to be there for him."

She helped get Peter released by delivering a retainer fee to an attorney, money given to her by an associate of Peter's in the drug operation. After Peter made bond, he skipped out.

Motivation is a slippery creature. How to know whether Kemba operated at this time out of desire--for a man, a status, a lifestyle--or fear? Now, before the circumstances had turned entirely sinister, could she have left the relationship?

Kemba and her therapists say the Philadelphia incident was decisive. They argue that after the choking, a switch was thrown in Kemba's psyche. She felt threatened, helpless and determined to do whatever it took to survive.

Holly Maguigan, a professor of clinical law at New York University who specializes in domestic violence cases, says research supports the idea that a brutal first-time event can create enough fear to prevent a woman from leaving.

Back in December 1991, if you had asked Kemba why she helped bring Peter home, she would have said "love." Now, she believes the impulse to save him was really an impulse to save herself, because even when he was far away, she did not feel secure. He had friends. He would get out one day.

"I was in something that I had lost control of, and everything was just him--what he wanted me to do," she says.

In the summer of 1992, Kemba became involved in the drug ring in a number of supporting roles. Sometimes she carried a gun in her purse for him. Eventually, she flew to New York with money strapped to her body.

"I was scared," she says. "I couldn't believe he was asking me. I initially asked him, 'Why me?' And he exploded and was like, 'Don't ask any questions, just do it.' And he started getting the money together and pulling out what he wanted me to wear."

Later, she rode back to Charlotte in a van carrying cocaine, although she says she never knew drugs were tucked in a hidden compartment inside the vehicle.

By the start of senior year, Kemba was on academic probation. At Peter's suggestion, she left Hampton and moved more than 300 miles away to Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte. The plan, Kemba says, was for Peter to live with her, but during the fall semester he didn't come as he'd promised.

Instead, Peter remained in the Hampton University area, moving into a two-bedroom apartment in Newport News with a mutual friend, a female college student who would later have a baby by him. (She would find out during the course of the relationship that Peter already had three children, all by different mothers.)

Kemba believed the relationship between Peter and his roommate, whom she calls her "ex-best-friend," was one of "brother and sister." She calls herself "naive" now for not realizing that it became more.

And yet, despite the distance and Peter's divided attention, Kemba says he still managed to maintain a grip on her. They talked daily, and he berated her for the minutiae of her behavior.

Around this time, the Smiths, already alienated from their daughter, became increasingly anxious when bounty hunters began contacting them, trying to locate Peter and others through Kemba. Gus and Odessa had met Peter, whom they knew as Khalif, only twice. They didn't know he was their daughter's boyfriend. He had told them he was a pre-law student, and impressed them as "polite," if not warm. The worst they could say about him was that during one of the visits, he had shocked Odessa by asking for a beer.

One day, Kemba got a call from a bounty hunter asking about Peter. She spoke to him for about 10 minutes, trying not to give any information. Then she called Peter and he told her to come to Newport News.

There, enraged because he didn't trust her account of the call, Hall took her in the back bedroom and beat her with a belt.

"When I was on the floor and he was kicking me," Kemba says, "he kneeled down and grabbed me by my neck and he was like, 'Don't you know that I can kill you?' "

She remembers looking at herself in a mirror after the beating, standing in a bra and panties, bruises on her back and down her legs.

"I was pretty much still in shock from everything, body shaking, crying and stuff. He like kind of lay back on the bed and told me to dance for him. And he turned on the CD player and started playing music. I was violated. Violated and embarrassed."

She began to dance, crying. He stopped her. "He told me to 'come here' and I went to him and he was holding me and telling me he's sorry . . . and he was just trying to look out for my best interests."

In the winter of '92-93, Peter finally came to Charlotte to live with her.

In February, he was arrested on a drug charge in New York. Kemba bailed him out with money given to her by Peter's brother. Peter soon found a reason to become enraged, and beat her again. Shortly after returning to Charlotte, she suffered a miscarriage. She asked her father to wire her money for a bus trip home, and was sitting on the bus in the station when Peter rushed onto it, saying, "Don't you know you can't leave me?"

She didn't leave him.

In May 1993, Kemba learned just how far Peter would go to punish transgressions. Peter, his female roommate from Newport News and his best friend, Derrick "D" Taylor, left Charlotte on a road trip. They didn't tell Kemba where or why.

In Dinwiddie County, Va., Peter murdered his friend, Taylor, while his female friend waited for him up the road, according to court testimony and federal indictments. He called Kemba and had her meet them with a car in a hotel parking lot in Charlotte. Peter and his friend left their van in the lot, dropped Kemba at home, then fled in the car to Atlanta.

Kemba did her part in silence.

"I knew that there was something going on because I could sense the tension, and [the female friend] wasn't saying anything and [Peter] wasn't saying anything and I was pretty much scared to ask."

Then, Peter called and told Kemba to remove various items from the house--including guns and photographs--and put them in a rented storage shed. Days later, she traveled to Atlanta, where Peter, who had taken an apartment with the other woman, told her the news: He had killed Taylor because he suspected he had been cooperating with federal agents.

Kemba was shocked but scared to show any reaction. She had baby-sat Taylor's twins, and she wanted to cry. Later, the three watched a violent film that included a scene of a man who'd been shot.

"That's how that nigga D went out," Kemba recalls Peter saying. He was laughing.

When Peter told her around this time that he suspected her father had been helping the government, Kemba began to worry for her parents.

Later that summer, Peter instructed Kemba to meet with agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Internal Revenue Service to find out what she could about their investigation.

Even as agents offered Kemba immunity in exchange for cooperation, she told them lies that Peter had constructed. No, she said, she'd never met Peter's brother, Unique. No, she knew nothing about the murder of Derrick Taylor. She told authorities that she was a prostitute.

After giving Peter a rundown of the interview, she returned to her parents' home near Richmond, and began a tense five-month hiatus from her boyfriend. She enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University and began an administrative job at the Virginia Housing Development Authority. Despite the fact that she and Peter spoke frequently on the phone, Kemba's life had begun to feel almost normal again. She contemplated what it would be like to be without Peter, but still was afraid to break up with him.

Peter was in Atlanta until November, when his female friend was arrested. He escaped capture by nearly running over a Hampton vice detective and a DEA agent in his car, according to the grand jury's indictment. He fled to New Orleans, then Houston.

Unbeknown to the Smiths, Kemba was still in touch with him by telephone and was wiring money to him--her own and her parents'.

In December, just days before a grand jury handed up an indictment of Peter, Kemba and 10 other defendants, Peter called, asking Kemba to meet him.

She simply left the house for work one day and didn't come back. She met Peter in Houston, and for nine months they were on the lam, in the Southwest and on the West Coast. Despite his precarious circumstances, Peter was still out for revenge. In San Diego, he tried to track down the erstwhile roommate and girlfriend who had assisted him with Derrick Taylor's murder, because he suspected her of turning to the authorities. He couldn't find her.

In Seattle, now newly pregnant, Kemba lived with Peter in a series of small apartments for four months. They had little money; sometimes they went without meals. The balance of power between them had changed, she says, and she found it easier to argue with him. She prevailed upon Peter to let her go home, if only for the sake of the baby.

"He finally told me that I could go home. . . . He wanted a good life for the baby," Kemba testified at her sentencing hearing. "He felt as if I was aggravating him a lot and he said that he didn't want to end up hurting me."

She took a train to Richmond, where she met with her parents and learned that there was a warrant out for her arrest. On Sept. 1 she turned herself in and was placed in jail without bond. As it turned out, it would be her last day in the outside world.

On Sept. 30, Kemba again was interrogated by federal agents, and again refused to give the information they sought, information that would have likely earned her a bargain on her sentence. The government wanted Peter. Where was he?

She lied. She said she'd been in D.C. for the last nine months.

By this time, the U.S. Marshals Service had placed Peter Hall on its 15 Most Wanted fugitives list, and was closing in on his location. But the Marshals Service would not be the first to find him.

The same day or the day after she talked to federal agents, Kemba says she had a dream: Peter was dying and released her from the deceit.

"He was in my arms and I was crying and he was telling me, 'It's okay, go ahead, it's okay.' "

She told her attorney, Robert Wagner, who says he "went right to the pay phone and called [the prosecutor] and said to him, 'She's ready to tell you where Peter is.' "

Wagner says the prosecutor responded, "It's too late. He's dead."

Peter had been shot once in the head by a still-unknown person in his Seattle apartment Oct. 1.

When Kemba heard the news, "I burst into tears." But there was relief, too, that the lying could stop, that her child--born William Armani Smith two months later--could begin his life in safety.

"I think God gave me Armani," Kemba says. Otherwise, "I don't know if Peter would have told me it was okay to go home. I could have been in the apartment with him when he was killed."

Acting on the advice of Wagner, Kemba pleaded guilty to three charges: conspiracy to crack and powder cocaine trafficking, money laundering and making false statements to federal agents. The amount she was charged with trafficking, 255 kilograms of crack cocaine, was 170 times the amount needed to trigger a 20-year sentence--even though she never actually sold any drugs.

Despite the relatively passive nature of Kemba's crimes, her guilty plea left her naked in a storm of angry jurisprudence. The devastating impact of crack cocaine on inner cities in the mid-1980s, combined with an increasing desire to legislate prison sentences rather than leaving them to capricious judges, resulted in a system dominated by prosecutors featuring stiff minimums. Under this system, only the government can seek a reduction in the minimum sentence.

When prosecutors are in charge, the importance of defendants' cooperating with investigators is magnified. Those who talk are rewarded, and those who remain silent are punished--sometimes to an extreme.

While 13 defendants were charged in the Hall brothers' drug ring, plenty more escaped prosecution because they assisted investigators. One who escaped was Peter's ex-roommate and girlfriend, the accomplice in Derrick Taylor's murder. She cooperated with authorities and was placed in the witness protection program.

In some ways, Kemba's refusal to cooperate was her biggest crime.

Kemba's attorneys, Wagner and William P. Robinson--who came on after Kemba pleaded guilty--still saw reason to hope. Wagner says the prosecutor had promised him early on that he would ask for a sentence reduction--an allegation that forms the backbone of appeals undertaken by Kemba's current lawyers at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund.

But the prosecution never asked for any reductions--Kemba, after all, offered no aid in the government's hunt for a murderer--and the U.S. Attorney's Office says no promises for leniency were ever made.

Even without the prosecution's support, though, Kemba's attorneys hoped they could win a lesser sentence by arguing that Peter's long-term abuse amounted to coercion or duress.

On the April day she was sentenced, Kemba wore a black-and-white checked jacket and black pants and sat in between her attorneys. Five years, she was thinking. I can accept five years. That's how long she thought she'd get, based on what she'd understood from her attorneys and her own hope.

When she heard the judge's opinion, she felt herself go cold.

U.S. District Judge Richard Kellam rejected the coercion argument:

"How could her fear have completely controlled all of her conduct up until the time that she decided . . . that she was going to cooperate with the government?" Kellam asked.

Then she heard "294 months."

She didn't instantly translate that into years, but she knew it was a long time. Her legs felt weak. She heard her mother crying behind her.

Critics contend that mandatory minimums, and their ripple effect, are not punishing the major drug players they were intended for.

Instead, according to 1993 statistics from the Department of Justice, low-level players--first-time, nonviolent offenders whose criminal activity was not sophisticated--numbered over one-third of those in federal prison on drug charges and were serving an average of nearly seven years.

Moreover, a 1994 study from the Federal Judicial Center concluded that black and Hispanic offenders are disproportionately affected by federal drug sentencing laws when compared with whites. Under the minimums, it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same five-year sentence as five grams of crack--a drug whose use is higher among blacks. Also, for whatever reasons, whites are more likely to plead guilty and receive reductions for cooperating with investigators.

Even as prominent a conservative as U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said the mandatory minimums were "perhaps a good example of the law of unintended consequences."

Robinson and, more recently, Legal Defense Fund attorneys, have filed a steady stream of appeals and civil motions on Kemba's behalf charging that, even aside from the promises allegedly made to Kemba by the prosecutors, her own attorneys failed her: They should have been able to show that her level of participation in the drug ring in no way merited a 24 1/2-year sentence.

The U.S. Attorney's Office says this simply isn't true.

"The judge found that her participation [in the ring] was in fact substantial," says U.S. Attorney Helen Fahey. "The idea that she didn't do any harm, I think, ignores the fact that $4 million of crack cocaine ended up on the street with her assistance."

Fahey suggests that the discrepancy between sentences for drug crimes and those for, say, second-degree murder may reflect that the system is too lenient, rather than too tough: "The problem may be that the sentences for other crimes, especially violent crimes, have been inappropriately low in the past."

The latest civil action on Kemba's behalf was filed in December in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. If it fails, Kemba's lawyers say their only choice would be to go to the Supreme Court. It's a long shot, to say the least. Even those who are sympathetic to Kemba Smith suggest that legal maneuvering may not work.

Judge Robert Doumar has been presiding over the appeals in district court. In rejecting a civil motion in October, Doumar wrote: "The court is indeed sympathetic to the plight of petitioner Smith. She is the recipient of a truly heavy sentence--an occurrence that has become standard practice under the Sentencing Guidelines. . . . In the opinion of the undersigned, the Guidelines represent a prime example of how Congress is sometimes unaware of the unintended consequences of its legislation."

But he added that his hands were tied under the law.

He recommended she apply to the president for a pardon.

Odessa Smith wasn't cut out for this type of crusade. She cries over the telephone and while speaking in front of auditoriums. Her voice breaks when she says the word "prison." When she talks to her daughter, it is she who despairs and Kemba who comforts. To this day, Odessa has not read the government's presentencing report, which lays out the body of her daughter's crimes. It hurts too much.

Gus, on the other hand, keeps a war room.

It is stocked with articles written about his daughter, court documents, letters from strangers in support of his daughter. He has T-shirts with Kemba's picture on them. He keeps mementos from the different universities where they have traveled to speak: Columbia, Virginia Commonwealth, George Washington, Alabama State, Michigan State. Sometimes they go to four in a month.

It is December. Gus is speaking to students at the University of Massachusetts. He talks about race and sex and the war on drugs.

"If this is justice," Gus is saying, "then we need to change the definition of justice in America." He shakes his fist and jabs his index finger.

Odessa sits off to the side. She wears all black, as she often does these days. She is petite, and when she sits, hands together, feet together, she seems to curl into herself. If Gus believes his daughter is part of a bigger picture, Odessa can't get past the missing.

In the audience, Armani wriggles on a woman's lap. After the speeches, while the crowd mills, he runs over to the podium and seizes a box of sugar cubes that Gus uses to demonstrate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. (This is one sugar cube of crack, Gus explains during his speech, and this is one box filled with cocaine. Either one will get you five years.)

Armani runs with the sugar toward his grandfather. "Daddy, your crack cocaine! Daddy, your crack cocaine!"

Gus takes the box, and explains carefully that it is sugar, not drugs. Drugs are not to be toyed with.

"He's getting confused," Gus says. "He's getting very confused."

True. But the confusions are often piercing. Armani is an intelligent and feisty preschooler, with a love for crab legs, Pokemon and stickers. He struggles to comprehend the absence of his mother. Gus says that one day recently, Armani remarked, "I don't want to die before Mommy comes home."

But, when will she? The Smiths are more cautious about Kemba's prospects than they were in the beginning. There was a flurry of attention following a lengthy magazine article on Kemba four years ago, and Gus and Odessa thought for sure the activity would generate freedom. The injustice seemed so obvious to them.

But it hasn't happened. In the meantime, the money situation since Kemba's incarceration has been tricky. Because of attorneys' fees topping $40,000, and because Gus lost his job, the Smiths twice declared bankruptcy. They put a second mortgage on the house and liquidated their retirement funds.

Telling her story in a penitentiary visitors' room, Kemba says she knows that her chances of getting out soon are slim. But what alternative is there to hope when reality is intolerable?

If she serves her full sentence--at least 21 years if she qualifies for "good time"--she will be in middle age when she gets out. Her parents may no longer be alive. Her son will be a grown man, and will have long since formed an opinion about why his mother was in jail.

A visitor asks her what she sees when she looks 19 years ahead, and she says she doesn't see anything. It's all cloudy.

And then, a few moments later, she interrupts with this:

"I don't see myself in prison, though--that's important." She laughs, as if this goes without saying.

"I do know that. I hope. I can't see myself in prison 'cause if I do I'll go crazy. I can't do 19 years."

© Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company

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