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| Mukasey: Convicts released early are likely to commit crimes, the attorney general warns. Ali Abbas/Reuters/file |
As many crack convicts are freed early, will crime rise
Of the 19,500 drug offenders eligible over the next 30 years to apply for early release, 3,417 have had their sentences reduced as of Monday.
from the April 9, 2008 edition
Page 4 of 4
"Under the logic that we shouldn't let them out because they may reoffend, well, that's true today, may be true tomorrow, and a decade from now," he says. "We have not done much in the meantime to ensure there's positive change when people are in prison."
Murky case: twins ask for release
The change in the sentencing guidelines, while a legal technicality, does have a significant impact on individuals' lives. Karen Garrison, a Washington, D.C., mother, has fought for 10 years to have the guidelines changed because she feels her twin sons were unjustly convicted under the 1986 law.
Just a month after graduating from Howard University in Washington with degrees in political science, Lawrence and Lamont Garrison were convicted of dealing crack cocaine. They had been named as conspirators by a man accused of running an automobile body shop to hide a significant crack-cocaine distribution network in Maryland, according to a summary of court records. Other conspirators he named also implicated the Garrisons, saying they saw them receive large quantities of crack cocaine from the dealer.
When police searched the Garrisons' home, belongings, and bank accounts, they did not find any drugs or indications of large cash infusions. Indeed, both had significant debts from college. But police did find phone records that indicated the twins were in regular contact with the dealer at the auto body shop. The Garrisons said that was because they were fixing up an old car at the time, a hobby of theirs. They insisted they were innocent, refused to cooperate, and went to trial.
"They believed in the system. They said, 'Mommy, don't worry, when we go to court, they'll see we're not drug dealers,' " Ms. Garrison says. " 'They'll see that we were at school, that we don't do those things.' "
Nonetheless, both were convicted. Lawrence was given 15-1/2 years and Lamont 19-1/2 years, because he was also convicted of perjury, according to a summary of the Garrisons' case. That summary showed that the dealer who accused them cooperated with prosecutors and was sentenced to three years.
"If you can't find any drugs or any guns or money and they're taking the word of an informant and not really checking out his story, a lot of people who are innocent are going to end up in jail like my sons," Ms. Garrison says.
Whatever the truth of the matter, each brother has served more than 10 years now. During that time, they taught other inmates high-school equivalency and legal writing classes, and neither has had any problems, according to their mother.
Both have applied for a reduction in their sentences.
If approved by the federal judge, Lawrence could be home sometime this year. Lamont could have his sentence reduced by almost four years and be home in 2012.
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