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Thread: Here Are 7 Americans Sentenced to Die in Prison (Life sentences) for Nonviolent Drug Crimes

  1. #1

    Here Are 7 Americans Sentenced to Die in Prison (Life sentences) for Nonviolent Drug Crimes

    America’s decades-long war on drugs seems to be finally winding down, with voters having legalized marijuana in four states and lawmakers across the country rolling back harsh sentencing laws. But it’s not over for the thousands of men and women still serving long sentences in state and federal prisons for nonviolent drug offenses. Nationwide, an estimated half-million people are behind bars for drug crimes. More than 2,500 of them are serving life without parole, though their offenses did not involve weapons or direct harm to anyone, according to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union. Here are some of the most remarkable cases.

    Leland Dodd

    As Leland Dodd puts it, he’s locked up for life for “talking about buying some marijuana.” He was arrested in a Holiday Inn in Midland City, Oklahoma in 1991 in the middle of to buy 50 pounds of pot from a guy who turned out to be an undercover cop. That, on top of his four prior convictions for drugs and possession of an unlicensed firearm, was enough for an LWOP.

    Cornell Hood

    Cornell Hood was convicted twice on marijuana sales charges but got off each time with probation. That ended in 2010 when his probation officer found a digital scale, $1,125 in cash, and two pounds of pot in his house in Slidell, Louisiana. Though Hood had never served time for the earlier offenses, the prosecutor on his latest bust convinced the judge they should be counted as “strikes.” Hood wound up with a sentence of life without parole. His lawyers appealed, backed by hundreds of protesting locals and The Times-Picayune. They won—sort of. Hood, 39, is now serving 25 years.

    Robert James Riley

    Robert James Riley, 62, followed the Grateful Dead around the country in the 1970s and 1980s, and like many Deadheads he partially financed his peripatetic lifestyle with a little small-scale drug dealing outside the shows. Riley’s long strange trip included two short jail stints for selling small amounts of weed and amphetamines. In 1993, though, he was caught mailing some LSD to a buddy. That guy testified against Riley and got off with a light sentence.

    Normally, Riley’s offense would have meant about three years in prison. Prosecutors, however, have broad discretion whether to trigger harsh mandatory minimum sentences by counting prior convictions, and Riley’s insisted the nonviolent priors be counted as strikes. The result was a sentence of life without parole.

    Even Judge Ronald Longstaff, who had no choice but to impose that sentence, was appalled. “The mandatory life sentence as applied to you is not just, it’s an unfair sentence, and I find it very distasteful to have to impose it,” he declared at Riley’s sentencing. Years later, Longstaff wrote a letter in support of Riley’s petition to have his sentence commuted, saying, “It gives me no satisfaction that a gentle person such as Mr. Riley will remain in prison the rest of his life.” The petition was not granted.

    Anthony Kelly

    Anthony Kelly was at a friend’s apartment in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner on the evening of July 1, 1999, when police officers broke down the door with a battering ram and swarmed inside. Tipped off by an informant who had recently bought a small bag of weed at the apartment, the cops found 21 nickel bags of pot in the toilet, along with a bunch more cannabis scattered around the place. Everyone present was arrested.

    At trial, Kelly said he was only there because he had given the apartment’s inhabitant, Gwendolyn Minor, a ride to the store and had been helping her bring in groceries when the police arrived. Minor testified that the pot was hers, and Kelly wasn’t involved in selling it. Nonetheless, Kelly was convicted. Year earlier, he had pleaded guilty to two charges of cocaine possession; those earlier strikes plus his new conviction meant life without parole.

    Kelly, now 41, appealed his sentence, partly on the ground that he hadn’t realized those earlier guilty pleas could later be used against him so harshly. Louisiana law does require that a trial court tell a defendant about his or her “sentencing exposure” before accepting a guilty plea—but that law didn’t come into effect until 1997, two years after Kelly’s second such plea.

    Dennis Capps

    Dennis Capps, 40, was sentenced in January 2013 to life in federal prison after getting nabbed in Wayne County, Missouri, with six ounces of meth—minor-league stuff at the federal level. That offense normally carries a 10-year sentence, but prosecutors chose to count two decade-old meth convictions as strikes against Capps. As a result, once Capps was found guilty, the judge, Audrey Fleissig, had no choice but to impose a life sentence. She was not happy about it: "It is difficult to impose a sentence of life with respect to an individual who was a model prisoner on probation and showed the ability to conquer his substance abuse for a lengthy period,” she said at Capps’ sentencing. “I don't think that a mandatory minimum sentence of life here makes a whole lot of sense.”

    The legal mechanism the prosecutors used in this case to make the previous charges count as strikes is known as an 851 filing. In August 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder specifically instructed federal prosecutors to stop using 851 filings in cases that involved only minor offenders—like Capps. Unfortunately for Capps, he was convicted eight months before Holder issued the directive.

    Fate Vincent Winslow

    One day in September 2008, a stranger ambled up to Fate Vincent Winslow and asked if he could score $20 worth of pot. Winslow, hungry and living on the streets of Shreveport, Louisiana, at the time, agreed and went off to score two dime bags—about one-eighth of an ounce—from a guy he knew. Big mistake: The buyer turned out to be an undercover cop. A jury found Winslow guilty of marijuana distribution. Tiny though the deal was, it constituted Winslow’s fourth strike: He’d been convicted twice for burglary many years earlier (including once for rummaging through an unlocked car without taking anything) and once for cocaine possession. Now 47, with no funds to hire a lawyer from his cell in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Winslow wrote his own appeal in pencil. It did not succeed.

    William Dufries

    In February 2003, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper pulled over an R.V. with Georgia plates and a broken taillight for speeding. Inside, he found 67 pounds of marijuana. The R.V.’s driver, William Dufries, later said that he had been drawn into the weed transporting business because he had to pay off medical bills after being diagnosed with lung cancer. That cut no ice with the judge, and thanks two prior convictions Dufries was sentenced to life without parole. He had pleaded guilty in 1988 to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and in 1996 to possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. “Never going home for a nonviolent crime is just the worst,” Dufries, 57, later told the ACLU. “If I had killed someone or been a child predator, I could understand, but I just don’t—it is cruel, harsh and so wrong.”
    http://news.yahoo.com/7-americans-se...105555995.html



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  3. #2
    May the DA's and judges in each one of these cases, and the hundreds of thousands like them, dies slow and excruciatingly painful deaths!

    I've said for decades that I hold the hierarchy of the "Just-Us" system accountable and each of these cases cement that opinion.

  4. #3
    I have no idea the life expectancy of a prisoner serving life without parole. If we use 40 years at a rate of $30k per year we are talking around $3 billion in taxpaying dollars for just these (2,500) guys. The Prison Industrial Complex racket is as bad as the M.I.C. racket. And cops are the foot soldiers but as tod points out it has it's lieutenants and generals. War IS a racket. This includes the "War on Drugs."
    Last edited by phill4paul; 01-13-2015 at 09:07 AM.

  5. #4
    Anyone who engages in a war knows that the quickest way to end the war is to take out the oppositions command structure...

    A peaceful people do not prolong war, even when that war is declared on them.

  6. #5
    This is definitely a racket--you just have to follow the money trail...


    “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”

    The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

    <snip>

    STATISTICS

    Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.
    http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pri...f-slavery/8289
    “The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by donnay View Post
    This is definitely a racket--you just have to follow the money trail...



    http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pri...f-slavery/8289
    Yup. Ever heard of Corizon? $1.8 billion a year for sub-par or non-existent healthcare of inmates.



    Gotta love their logo. It reminds me of....something....


  8. #7
    Heard of them now. SMDH

    Corizon, which has its corporate headquarters in Brentwood, Tenn., operates in 552 correctional facilities across the country. New York City began contracting with Corizon in 2008. Its current contract for $126 million expires on Dec. 31, 2015.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/ny...ults.html?_r=0
    “The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner

  9. #8
    There should be a law against sentencing people to life-terms for, non-violent crimes.

    Don't these kind of things ever bother politicians one bit?
    FJB



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  11. #9
    bump
    "He's talkin' to his gut like it's a person!!" -me
    "dumpster diving isn't professional." - angelatc
    "You don't need a medical degree to spot obvious bullshit, that's actually a separate skill." -Scott Adams
    "When you are divided, and angry, and controlled, you target those 'different' from you, not those responsible [controllers]" -Q

    "Each of us must choose which course of action we should take: education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes. But let it not be said that we did nothing." - Ron Paul

    "Paul said "the wave of the future" is a coalition of anti-authoritarian progressive Democrats and libertarian Republicans in Congress opposed to domestic surveillance, opposed to starting new wars and in favor of ending the so-called War on Drugs."

  12. #10
    Kind of OT , but I wonder how many of the 10 prisoners killed in the prison bus crash today were serving sentences for things that someone shouldn't even be caged for? They got their death sentence.

    And I've seen lots of comments online cheering their deaths (while of course the guards are mourned). Lots of sick people out there.



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