Yesterday was momentous for the Smith family. Kemba Smith was released from prison, where she'd been held for more than six years. She was granted clemency--the last hope she had pinned everything on. She was to return, finally: to her parents' house outside Richmond; to her 6-year-old son, who has never known her as a free person; and to an unlikely celebrity.

"President Clinton's commutation of Kemba's sentence answers our prayers--nearly seven years of prayers, which seem like an eternity," said the parents, Gus and Odessa Smith, in a statement.

Kemba Smith stood--and stands--for a lot of things now, one day after Clinton officially commuted her sentence of 24 1/2 years, which she spent mainly at a federal prison in Danbury, Conn. For one, she stands for the controversy surrounding federal drug sentencing laws passed in the '80s: Smith was a fringe player in a crack cocaine ring--a first-time, nonviolent offender--whose penalties were greater than the average state sentence for murder or voluntary manslaughter.

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Smith also stands as testament to the wreckage that physical abuse can make of a young life. It was her boyfriend's abuse, she has said, that made her afraid to leave their life of crime. She has changed a great deal during her time in prison. There are still glimmers of the teenager she once was--naive, sheltered--but a certain toughness overshadows it now. She is 29 going on 50.

Kemba Smith was one of 62 prisoners granted clemency yesterday, just in time for Christmas. A lame-duck president must not seem so ineffectual to her. For years, her parents had tried nearly every avenue available. Numerous appeals and civil motions, along with a substantial grass-roots campaign, left them with no relief, desperate and twice bankrupted. In between speeches at universities, visits to Connecticut and raising Kemba's son, Armani, they prayed. Odessa Smith cried a great deal. Earlier this year, they filed a request for clemency with the help of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, which has been working on the case pro bono since 1996.

Early yesterday morning, an attorney from the Legal Defense Fund came to Danbury to meet with Smith. The first buzz about her pending release hit the news around noon, and Gus Smith, reached at home, said simply, "We're hoping and praying." The commutation came through later in the afternoon, and prison officials began processing paperwork. At 5:29, Smith was officially released.

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At the turn of the last decade, Smith--the middle-class only daughter of a school teacher and an accountant--was a sophomore at Hampton University in Virginia when she became involved in a relationship with a man nine years her senior. Jamaican-born Peter Hall turned out to be a drug dealer who used young women as drug-carrying mules in a murderous East Coast crack ring. But this information came gradually to Smith, as did her descent into fear, as Hall became increasingly abusive.

A low-level participant in Hall's circle, Smith helped him in a number of ways, bailing him out of jail and carrying money for him, and even keeping a gun in her purse. And when push finally came to shove in the autumn of '94, Smith--reluctant to bargain information for a likely reduction in her sentence--wound up being charged with trafficking 255 kilograms of crack cocaine. She never actually sold any drugs.

About the same time, Hall was murdered.

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Drug law reform groups crowed yesterday that mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines are facing increasing scrutiny. Dorothy Gaines of Mobile, Ala., a low-level drug offender carrying a weighty sentence of 19 years, was also granted clemency yesterday. The plights of Gaines and Smith have been heavily publicized.

"Kemba Smith is not the drug kingpin type that Congress intended to target when it passed the federal mandatory minimums," said Laura Sager, executive director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "Like thousands of other low-level drug offenders, she may have deserved some punishment but she received a disproportionately harsh sentence for her role in the drug trade."

A judge who rejected one of Smith's appeals in October '99 wrote that her prison sentence was "truly heavy" and represented one of the "unintended consequences" of congressional legislation. He said he could do nothing, but recommended that Smith apply for clemency.

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Yesterday, that advice bore fruit. Now, Smith starts the long process of becoming free.

"They've got a lot of rebuilding to do," said veteran journalist Reginald Stuart, who broke Smith's story for the now-defunct Emerge magazine in 1996 and has stayed close to the Smiths. "I will visit sometime soon and meet the Smith family--because I met Kemba Smith and I met her parents, but I never met the Smith family."

Citing their need for privacy, a spokeswoman for Smith said she and her family would not be speaking to the media. But in her statement, she said, "Since I was incarcerated in September, 1994 . . . I have dreamed of the opportunity to be an everyday parent."

Now that begins.

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