Drug Kingpin's Release Adds to Clemency Uproar

A federal prosecutor who had urged Justice Department superiors to reject clemency for Vignali demanded an official explanation--only to be denied information from his own department. The judge who sentenced Vignali is openly aghast at the decision, which was made without his knowledge. And they all--from defense attorneys to street detectives to former pardon attorney Love--scoffed that Vignali could have walked free without the intervention of politically connected helpers.

Key details of the case remain a mystery. Did political officials and other authoritative figures appeal for Vignali's freedom to the president or high-ranking Justice Department officials? What action, if any, did the Justice Department recommend to the White House?

Vignali could not be reached for comment. But his father strongly denied that he or anyone else in the family asked politicians to press their case with Clinton.

"I didn't write him a letter, I didn't do anything," Horacio Vignali said. "But I thank God, and I thank the president every day."

For now, the Vignali case is a curious tale of how an inmate buried deep in the federal penal system won presidential help while others in more desperate straits remained behind.

"Go figure," said an exasperated Craig Cascarano, the lawyer for one of Vignali's 30 co-defendants, many of them poor and black. "How is it that Carlos Vignali is out eating a nice dinner while my client is still in prison eating bologna sandwiches?"

Clinton Concerned About Drug Sentences

Clinton and his White House staff have not fully explained why he granted certain clemencies, including the highly controversial pardon of fugitive commodities broker Marc Rich.

But in recent months, the president had expressed concern about mandatory federal sentences imposed on some small-time drug offenders.

"The sentences in many cases are too long for nonviolent offenders," Clinton said in a November interview with Rolling Stone magazine. ". . . I think this whole thing needs to be reexamined."

His comments prompted a flurry of last-minute clemency requests to the White House, said the former president's spokesman, Jake Siewert, particularly since Clinton believed that Justice was not moving fast enough in making clemency recommendations to the White House.

"Most of the drug cases involved people with a sentence that the prosecutor or the sentencing judge felt was excessive," Siewert said, "but were necessitated by mandatory-minimum guidelines.