New Sentencing Rules Mean Life for 1st Offender

Ernest (Polo) Staley was small potatoes as drug dealers go. The feds caught him with a measly 686 grams of crack. A street value of maybe $68,000. No prior convictions.

But Polo Staley, small-time hood, this week got something that even the big timers rarely get: life in prison.

In one of the starkest examples of tough new federal sentencing guidelines, U.S. District Judge William Stafford in Tallahassee, Fla., sent Staley to prison for good. No chance of parole.

Federal prosecutor Mike Moore was jubilant. “We caught him selling crack just once, but he’ll never sell it again, and that’s the kind of justice I want.”

High Court Rules

It is justice that Congress legislated into existence with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1987. Many judges were hesitant to use the new standards until the Supreme Court upheld them last January. Now the federal courts are beginning to experience the full effects.

The new guidelines were meant to end disparities prevalent in the federal system, where two criminals might have received vastly different sentences for very similar offenses.

A judge now has a strict range of sentencing for a crime, with specified aggravating and mitigating factors that may nudge the prison term up or down.

On Monday, Judge Stafford studied a pre-sentence report from the U. S. Probation Office that matter-of-factly totaled up enough points to seal away the 30-year-old Staley for all his days.

Those 686 grams of crack translated into 36 points on a sentencing table, which converts into a term of 188 to 235 months for a first-time offender.

But there were these aggravating factors:

--Staley was the “kingpin” of a drug organization, a small one, yes, with maybe only five workers, but an organization nonetheless.

--A firearm was involved. Staley bought a handgun and gave it to one of his street-level dealers for protection.

--The defendant tried to obstruct justice, offering to pay off a key witness to skip town.

Points Added Up

Under the new law, these facts rang up yet more points on the sentencing score card. Forty-three is enough for life. Staley had 44.

Public defender Robin Rosen knew the sum only too well. She pleaded with the judge. “I’ve represented people who took lives and received less of a sentence,” she said. “It’s a tragedy. I’m not saying this as an attorney; I’m saying this as a human being. Everybody has worth and dignity. Everybody should have a chance at rehabilitation.”

Staley’s father, a minister, urged the judge to show mercy. So did Staley’s mother, a missionary. Finally, the defendant himself spoke up:

“I can remember J. F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King saying every man and woman makes a difference. In order to make a difference, you have to be given a chance.”

Staley said that his months in prison awaiting trial already had beckoned him toward redemption. “I know drugs are a terrible problem, destroying our nation,” he said.

Judge Stafford agreed up to a point. Indeed, crack was a scourge.

But he reminded Staley that he had been convicted of three drug counts: possession, distribution and conspiracy--that he had ferried cocaine from city to city and cooked the powder himself into pellets of crack.

There were no extenuating circumstances to take this case outside the guidelines, the judge concluded: “It seems to me your activity was the type you could stop at any time.”

Rosen, the defense lawyer, plans an appeal, finding fault with the pre-sentencing report. “I’m still stunned by the tragedy of this,” she said.

In fact, Staley’s punishment is unusual, federal officials said--extraordinarily rare for a first offender, especially in a case involving 686 grams, or less than two pounds, of drugs.

Tough Sentences Common

But there is no doubt that tougher federal sentences are becoming the rule. “Guys are getting 15, 20, 25 years without parole, and a lot of times we’re just talking about two-three ounces of cocaine,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. John Gordon, chief of the Los Angeles gang drug task force.

“Prisons are going to be so jammed it’s unbelievable. Everything is changing . . . . We intend to put up flyers with the faces of guys, with their sentence underneath, to show their friends what’s happened to them.”

Yet if the new federal law has been consistently tougher, it also has created a greater disparity with the state system, where penalties are usually not as severe. “That’s the new crap shoot for the defendant: state or federal,” Gordon, the prosecutor, said.

Many defense attorneys oppose the new guidelines, arguing that they restrict the discretion of judges too much. “Sentencing by numbers has a real risk of treating some people too harshly and others not harshly enough,” said Neal Sonnett, president of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“A lot of people who were minor offenders in the general scheme of things are now being sentenced to the kind of terms we used to preserve for major dealers. I’m not sure that’s a productive way to go.

“Think about it. A lot of people get caught up in other people’s business. A lot get caught up in drugs because of peer group pressure.”