5 1/2 Ounces of Crack Brings Life Term With No Parole

A federal judge in Los Angeles Wednesday sentenced a 22-year-old man to life in prison without parole for possessing 5.5 ounces of crack cocaine, a relatively small amount in the booming world of drug trafficking.

The case marked only the second time in the United States--and the first time in California--that a judge had imposed such a sentence under a 1988 federal narcotics trafficking statute that provides for vastly stiffer sentences whenever defendants have two or more prior drug offenses.

In ordering Richard V. Winrow of South-Central Los Angeles to spend the rest of his life in prison, U.S. District Judge David W. Williams turned aside defense complaints that the sentence was “Draconian”--harsher than those given some murderers.

While the sentencing law is mandatory, Williams conceivably could have declared the law unconstitutional on grounds that it presented a cruel and unusual punishment or as a violation of his judicial freedom. He chose, however, to mete out the sentence.

“Congress has gone out to battle the drug war and this man is one of the enemies,” Williams said of Winrow.

“We have one or two things in common,” the 79-year-old black judge added, referring to the black defendant who was standing before him dressed in a blue jail shirt and blue pants. “We are the same race and we come from the same neighborhood. I grew up on East 109th Street.

“I know that neighborhood and I know how it’s changed,” the judge said. “The man is making it one of the neighborhoods you can’t live in, can’t walk down the streets on. My people are the victims.”

Williams said that Winrow, who prosecutors said was a member of the Mona Park Crips gang, had chosen “a life of crime by his long involvement with dope.”

Winrow, who was charged with possessing crack cocaine with intent to distribute it, had three prior state court convictions for cocaine possession and was on probation at the time of his arrest last year. He was also given a 10-year concurrent sentence by Williams for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

David Chesnoff, Winrow’s defense attorney, asked Williams not to use the new federal statute, arguing that it violated the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment and unlawfully stripped a judge of his discretion to tailor a sentence to a particular defendant.

Chesnoff also claimed that if the judge followed the statute he would be imposing “in fact, a death sentence” on Winrow, a contention that visibly upset the judge.

Not a Big-Time Dealer

The attorney said that there was no contention that Winrow had engaged in violent behavior and that the amount of drugs he was arrested for possessing indicated that he was not a big-time drug dealer.

If Winrow had been prosecuted for these crimes in state court, the maximum term he could have received was four years in prison, according to a spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

But Chesnoff’s argument failed to move Williams. After praising the quality of Chesnoff’s presentation, the judge made a dramatic speech from the bench stating why he felt the sentence of life without possibility of parole was appropriate.

Winrow remained calm throughout the judge’s remarks. When Williams asked him if he wanted to say anything that might mitigate his sentence, Winrow responded:

“The only thing I can think of right now is I’m sorry I was using drugs at the time. If I had had a better way of knowing drugs would control me the way they did, I wouldn’t have used them. . . . I know I wouldn’t have done it.”

But the judge responded, “You’re not here because you used drugs, but because you distributed drugs. It’s a much more serious offense.”

Special Assistant U.S. Atty. Lisa Lench, who prosecuted Winrow, praised the judge’s decision. She said Williams was “right on the law” and “eloquent in his description of the impact these people have on their own community.”

Lench said she hoped that publicity about Winrow’s sentence would have an impact on drug dealing in South-Central Los Angeles.

The U.S. attorney’s office was so impressed by the judge’s decision that Assistant U.S. Atty. John Gordon, chief of the multi-agency Los Angeles Gang Drug Task Force, said the agency plans to put posters up in South-Central Los Angeles with Winrow’s photograph, his crimes and his sentence, in an attempt to deter drug trafficking.

“We want to make absolutely sure that people in neighborhoods terrorized by gang crack dealing know that the law is out there and that the federal government is doing something,” Gordon said. “Too often in the streets, rumors fly around without any real knowledge of what’s going on.”

Gordon said the posters also will include photos of other local drug dealers who have received stiff sentences.

The only other case in which the new statute has been used to date occurred in Kansas City last month, where a defendant named James A. McKines was convicted for the third time of trafficking in PCP.

McKines was arrested at the Kansas City airport after law enforcement agents discovered that he had a six-pack of Mountain Dew soda cans filled with PCP, according to Peter M. Ossorio, head of the organized crime/drug unit of the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas City. McKines had two prior PCP-related convictions in Nevada, Ossorio said.

Several law professors were skeptical that stiff sentences like those imposed on Winrow and McKines will have much impact on drug dealing.

“Trying to do something about drug trafficking in individual cases through Draconian sentences is fruitless,” said UCLA law professor Robert Garcia, a former federal prosecutor in New York who handled drug cases there. “Harsh sentences are not going to solve the drug problem in the U.S.”

“I don’t like life sentence without the possibility of parole,” said Philip Johnson, a criminal law professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. “It seems to me it’s unnecessary and breeds a sense of hopelessness.”

Winrow was arrested in December, 1988, by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, who had been tipped off that he was dealing drugs from his mother’s house on East 118th Street, according to prosecutor Lench.

Lench said that when Winrow was taken into custody, agents found 151 grams (5.5 ounces) of crack cocaine inside plastic bags in his room. They also found a loaded .357-caliber pistol and $3,209 in cash.

When police burst into the house, Winrow shouted, “Don’t shoot! The gun and the dope are right there,” according to an affidavit by law enforcement agents filed in court. The affidavit also stated that Winrow told investigators he had been selling cocaine since 1986.

The law under which Winrow was prosecuted was part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Amendments Act of 1988. The law did not receive much publicity when enacted, in part because it came at the same time as a new statute reviving the federal death penalty for drug kingpins and persons convicted of drug-related killings.

Chesnoff said Winrow’s sentence will be appealed.