CHANGE OF HEART

Former Jailed Pol Wants Drug War Reform

Wants to roll back harsh sentence minimums.

Former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.), served seven years in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons on corruption charges—now he’s out and fighting against harsh mandatory sentence minimums for drug crimes. 72-year-old Cunningham is back living in Arkansas’ Hot Springs Village and, according to him, making time to call up Republican and Democrat “friends” to make himself available to testify (though he says he’s too afraid to come back to Capitol Hill, where “paparazzi would eat me alive”). “Unfortunately, some of my Democrat colleagues were right and I was wrong on some issues as far as criminal justice,” Cunningham told The Huffington Post. "I saw kids in there who are 19 to 30. They go into prison, they maybe got caught with cocaine or rock or something like that, and they give them 10 years minimum. What do they do when they get out? There's a lot of very nice guys that got caught up."