‘Guinea Pig’ for Drug War or a Hardened Criminal?

Abandoned by his father as a boy, Richard Winrow had fathered three children of his own while still a teen-ager. He dropped out of high school and worked at low-wage jobs. By his 20th birthday, he had been arrested three times for dealing drugs.

Through it all, Winrow entertained ambitions--he would play for the Lakers or sell real estate, do something to pull himself, his seven siblings and, most of all, his mother out of the poverty that surrounded them in South Los Angeles.

In both his difficulties and his unrealized dreams, there was, sadly, little about Winrow to separate him from many other young black men who grow up in the tougher corners of the nation’s big cities. One day last December, however, Richard Winrow’s ordinary life took an extraordinary turn.

The 22-year-old became the first person in California and only the second nationally to be sentenced for possession of drugs under a tough new federal statute targeted at repeat offenders. Caught with 5 1/2 ounces of cocaine, a relatively small amount, Winrow was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

“The sentence the judge gave me is beyond belief,” Winrow said recently in his first interview since the sentencing. He was seated in a prison conference room, his hands and feet manacled, his voice strong.

“I’m being used as a guinea pig for the war on drugs.”

Winrow’s case drew national attention, not only because of the severe sentence, but also because of the courtroom drama that preceded it last Dec. 6. The judge, 79-year-old David W. Williams, is a black man who grew up not far from Winrow’s house. He delivered to Winrow a stern, stirring sermon about the devastation that drug dealers had brought to their common neighborhood.

In the three months since, Winrow has been confined to a tiny two-man cell on Terminal Island, awaiting transfer to a larger prison. He has read several Stephen King novels, placed daily collect calls to his mother and sought to control his anger. He still has trouble accepting the finality of his sentence.

“I thought it was more or less a joke, because it wasn’t real,” he said, recalling his arrest two years ago at his mother’s home in the Willowbrook neighborhood of Southeast Los Angeles. “I went from sleeping at 4 o’clock . . . to being in federal court at 8 o’clock faced with life in prison.”

Winrow’s lawyer has filed an appeal of the mandatory sentencing law passed by Congress in 1988; the law sets sentences of life imprisonment without parole for people convicted for the third time of possessing 50 grams or more of crack cocaine or similar amounts of other drugs. It is the same sentence given to such notorious drug cartel kingpins as Carlos Lehder and Juan Matta Ballesteros. Legal experts, watching the case with interest, believe the challenge eventually will wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Law enforcement officials, meanwhile, have laid plans to place posters of Winrow throughout his neighborhood, a warning to those who would follow his path. They remain enthusiastic that the sentencing law applied to Winrow will serve as a deterrent to the small-time dealers who they contend are crucial, if expendable, operatives for the narcotics cartels.

Winrow believes he was selected as a test of the 1988 sentencing law--he had been charged before the only other case prosecuted under the statute was filed--because he fit the government’s image of a drug-dealing gang member.

“This kid is perfect,” he said officials must have thought. “He’s 21 years old, he’s from a poor family, a black neighborhood.”

In fact, on the very day Winrow was arrested, Justice Department officials had issued a press release saying they would go for the maximum sentence under the new law. Asked why Winrow had been chosen, Assistant U.S. Atty. John Gordon said, “The poor schmuck just happened to be unlucky that he is the first one.”

Winrow chose not to testify at his trial. He said he decided to grant an interview because “I thought it would be nice to let the public see who Richard Winrow is, that I’m not just a kid on the corner. . . . I’m very well-respected in my community.”

Winrow grew up in a crowded home without a father but full of love. “My mother raised eight children without any of them going to jail,” Winrow said. “It was a struggle, but she made it relatively easy. I had food and clothes. She would take from herself to give to me.”

His neighborhood, one of small frame homes, has its share of drug dealers. But he said the drive-by shootings and random violence that plague some parts of South Los Angeles did not find their way to his block on East 118th Street.

“It’s a nice community. People don’t walk around with blue rags hanging out of their pockets killing people,” he said, referring to the typical image of a gang member.

Winrow said most of his experiences in school were also good. During his years at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, Ralph J. Bunche Middle School and Alain Leroy Locke High School, “I had a nice experience learning about my black culture,” he said, “and all the great things black people had done.”

Winrow was a good student but, like so many of his peers, he placed most of his hope in his athletic skills. He wanted to become a professional basketball player, specifically, a Los Angeles Laker.

His grades dropped to a C average his junior year at Locke, and Winrow said it was in part because he’d become “a ladies’ man . . . too young for all the venturing I got into.” He volunteered the fact that by the age of 20 he had fathered three children by three women.

Annie Coleman is the mother of his first child. They met at Mona Park. “He used to be up there playing baseball and we started talking,” Coleman recalled in an interview at Winrow’s mother’s house. “He was nice. He was cute. We had fun.”

They started dating and she became pregnant. At the time, Winrow said, he was in the 11th grade at Locke High School. He was at a crossroads, torn between his dream of becoming a Laker--one of his coaches described the 5-foot-11 guard as a stand-out player with the potential to go further--and the reality that he was a teen-age father.

Winrow dropped out of school to work and take care of Annie and their baby, Jennifer, now 5. He took a job at Omeka Hair & Nails, a Compton beauty salon, as an assistant to the owner.

“I said I’ve got to be realistic and get out there and get a job . . . something that could give me and my daughter security for the rest of our lives,” Winrow said.

The mothers of his children say he was an attentive father. “It wasn’t so much what he gave them,” said LaTasha Kelly, 19, mother of Winrow’s 2-year-old daughter, Jasmine. “It was how he treated them.”

Similarly, Winrow’s mother, Lavern, his siblings and others who know him insist that he is not the hardened villain his sentence would suggest. Beatrice Smith Halliberton, assistant director of Mona Park for 27 years, said he “was never around the guys who would do dope. He was off to himself.” Roberta Green, Winrow’s grandmother, said he has “been through lots of hard times. He was raised up without a father. . . . Half of the time he had to scuffle for himself.”

Winrow said he knew that when he dropped out of school, any plans, including his basketball ambitions, became moot. “I wasn’t depressed over it. It was just one of those dreams that got washed down the tubes,” he said.

In March, 1986, Winrow began having problems with the law. He was arrested for possessing a small amount of cocaine. He was placed in a counseling program by a Municipal Court judge in Compton. Within the next year, Winrow was arrested twice more for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine.

In April, 1988, he pleaded guilty to charges stemming from all three of his arrests and was sentenced to six months in County Jail and three years of probation. Winrow served three months and was released. He contended in the interview that he had been harassed after his release by certain sheriff’s deputies, prompting him to move to the San Fernando Valley.

He lived away from his mother for about seven months, then returned home intending to take night classes at Locke to earn his general education degree. But those plans never got off the ground because Winrow was arrested again, just eight days after returning to the family home in Willowbrook.

Marv Washington, an investigator for the Sheriff’s Department, said an informant had tipped officers that Winrow and two other men were armed and dealing drugs. Washington also said that Winrow was a member of the Mona Park Crips, a gang he said has about 200 members and actively sells drugs in Los Angeles and several other cities.

Just before dawn on Dec. 8, 1988, a team of sheriff’s deputies and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, armed with a search warrant, stormed into Winrow’s bedroom and arrested him. Affidavits submitted by the officers said they found 151 grams (5 1/2 ounces) of crack cocaine in plastic bags in his room.

One officer said that when he went into the room, Winrow was sitting up in bed and said, “Don’t shoot! The gun and the dope are right there!” pointing toward a bookshelf at the foot of his bed.

“The narcotics were sitting on top of a triple-beam scale when the (deputies) found it,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Lisa Lench, who prosecuted the case. “There were 17 individually wrapped portions in a plastic wrap.”

The officers also found $3,209 in cash and a .357 magnum pistol.

Winrow was convicted last August after a trial that lasted two days. He did not testify, and one condition of interviewing him was that he not be asked any questions about his arrest or the events surrounding it.

Five months later, Winrow, wearing a blue prison uniform, went before Williams for sentencing in a small courtroom on the third floor of the federal courthouse.

His lawyer, David Chesnoff of Las Vegas, a 34-year-old man with a penchant for double-breasted suits and a sardonic wit, had handled many cases involving much greater quantities of drugs. But none had consequences greater than those facing Winrow.

Chesnoff made an impassioned plea to Williams to reject the congressional mandate that he impose a life sentence, asserting that the repeat offender law is unconstitutional.

Chesnoff asserted that under the 1988 sentencing law, a person like Winrow, “hardly a big-time drug dealer, finds himself in a position where he can receive a harsher sentence than someone who assassinated the President of the United States.”

Williams was not swayed.

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

The judge then delivered a long speech. He and Winrow, Williams said, have “one or two things in common. We are the same race and we come from the same neighborhood. I grew up on East 109th Street.

“I know the neighborhood and I know the way that it has changed from early days to what it is now, and that is a battleground where men like this . . . are killing people off with their drugs and their violence.

“And you say that this man is not connected with violence. He had a gun within arm’s reach when the officers arrested him. This man is one of those that is causing black neighborhoods to be neighborhoods that you cannot live in, that you cannot safely walk down the streets on. And he has, along with his confederates, brought about unbearable conditions, and my people are the victims.”

Winrow responded softly that he was “sorry” he used drugs.

“If I had a better way of knowing at the time that . . . they could take the rest of my life from me, I know I wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

During the interview, Winrow challenged virtually every aspect of Williams’ lecture. He said angrily that an old man who had left South Los Angeles 50 years ago could not possibly understand what it is like to live there today.

“He’s out of touch, way out of touch,” Winrow said. “It was just country, farmland, when he lived there.

“Television portrays an All-American family with two station wagons,” he continued. “Life is not like that in the (poor) black neighborhoods. It’s a struggle for survival every day.”

He ridiculed the judge’s statement that he was victimizing other black people.

“The police,” Winrow said, “come around and victimize us . They always portray a drug dealer as being black in the ghetto. Drugs come through airports, through shipping companies, underground. We don’t go to Colombia or Australia to get it. It comes to us. The drugs come to the ghetto, then the police come knowing it’s there. So, who are the victims?”

Winrow acknowledged that he smoked crack cocaine, mixed into marijuana cigarettes, for a week in 1986.

“It was just something the kids did,” he said. “I knew it was wrong. Ever since I did it, I felt funny about myself, so I tried to make a change because athletes don’t use drugs.” He said he stopped using narcotics after his first arrest “because it really devastated my family. My mother was the worst. She cried and it made me feel like crying.”

Robert Wilson, the supervising county probation officer for Winrow’s neighborhood, said Winrow had been tested twice monthly for drugs from the time he pleaded guilty in April, 1988, to October, 1988, shortly before he was arrested again. All the tests were negative.

Law enforcement officials hope Winrow’s case will serve as a deterrent. A gang-drug task force plans to plaster South-Central Los Angeles with posters bearing Winrow’s picture and describing his sentence. An artist’s rendering of the poster was being circulated among police officials last week.

“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,” said Gordon, chief of the Los Angeles Gang Drug Task Force.

DEA spokesman Ralph Lochridge said the stiff federal sentencing statute “is a tremendous tool for law enforcement,” because street-level drug dealers have traditionally been more afraid of gang leaders than of the law.

“When they have the possibility of life without parole,” Lochridge said, “it’s a real motivator for them to testify against gang leaders and sources of (drug) supply to the gangs. That’s an element we haven’t had.”

Winrow’s experience on this issue seems to run counter to police expectations: His attorney said Winrow had declined to give investigators information about narcotics trafficking in exchange for a lighter sentence.

In the interview, Winrow said the poster campaign “made me realize what I already knew. They wanted to use me as something they could show the world, that they’re doing something about crack users, drug dealers.”

He said his former neighbors will just tear the posters down.

Renee Scott, Winrow’s 29-year-old sister, also contends that her brother’s punishment will not curtail drug dealing.

“It ain’t woke these boys up,” Scott said, referring to the drug dealers her brother’s punishment is supposed to frighten. “They’re still doing the same thing. Look at all the laws they put up to stop drugs, and it ain’t done nothing.”

Only time will tell if the harsh sentencing law really has a deterrent effect on drug dealing, time that Winrow has plenty of.

“I’m sitting in a cell all day long,” he said. “Can’t watch television, the news, nothing.”

Winrow, according to a prison spokesman, has been placed in the two-man isolation unit not because of anything he has done in custody, but because of the length of his sentence.

He shares a 7-by-10-foot cell--equipped with a bunk bed, sink and toilet--with another man and said he is happy to have the company. At least that way he has someone to talk to, though he quickly added that he doesn’t even know why his roommate is in prison.

There is a routine--breakfast between 6:30 and 7 a.m. lunch about 11:30, dinner by 5 p.m. The food is handed through a slot in the door. He is allowed out for exercise one hour a day, considerably less than the regular inmate population.

Although he does not have as much contact with other inmates as he would like, Winrow said they have been supportive. He said he was comforted when a prison telephone operator told him on the phone that she thought he had been unfairly treated.

“Some people do have a heart,” he said.

During the time he has been in prison, Winrow said he has read about 10 books by best-selling author King, including “Pet Sematary,” and “The Shining.”

And in between, he takes time to phone his mother. Lavern Winrow said she waits for the calls. They come collect, lasting sometimes 30 minutes. Her phone bill runs up to $200 a month.

Winrow’s mother refuses to accept the fact that he might never be free again. “I don’t believe that. . . . They can’t keep him in the penitentiary for life. (Even) murderers don’t get life.”

At his insistence, Winrow has not seen any family members since his sentencing. “I won’t let them come down because I’m not in the general (prison) population. I can’t shower every day and look nice when they come see me.” He is particularly embarrassed by his dark brown jumpsuit, which differs from other inmates’ more attractive khaki outfits.

Similarly, Winrow won’t accept pictures or letters from family members, according to his former girlfriend, Coleman. She said she is not surprised that he won’t accept visitors. “He has a lot of pride,” she said in a recent interview. “If he didn’t look right, he wouldn’t leave the house.”

Williams said in a recent interview that he spent several sleepless nights before the sentencing hearing and that even today he finds himself thinking about his decision to put Winrow away for good. He said that he thinks the sentence was “unfair” but that his hands were tied by Congress.

It was the first time Williams, a 35-year veteran of the bench, had ever handed down a life sentence.

The judge acknowledges that life in South Los Angeles is tough, but he said Winrow was not forced to deal drugs. He said that other young black men, including himself, have found ways to better their lives without turning to crime.

“I worked my way through college, scrubbing floors and polishing cuspidors,” he recalled. “There’s nothing much worse than polishing brass spittoons in the lobby of a bank.”

Winrow, maintaining his innocence, is at the beginning stages of what could be a long appeal process. Arguments before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court will be held later this year or next year.

Chesnoff said he hopes the appeals court will follow a 9th Circuit decision of 1985 that placed some limitations on “mechanized sentencing,” a situation in which a judge has no discretion. “No one person may be used merely as an instrument of social policy,” appellate Judge William Canby wrote in that case.

Several constitutional and criminal law experts, however, said they believe Winrow faces an uphill struggle in efforts to get his sentence reduced. Appeals courts have been unreceptive to arguments that long, mandatory sentences violate the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Winrow’s grandmother fervently hopes the experts are wrong. “I hate to have to sit up here,” Roberta Green said, “and think I have to die and never see him again. I’d hate to die and think he’ll never breathe the fresh air again, never walk again--free.”

Through it all, Winrow remains optimistic that he will not remain behind bars for the rest of his life. Asked how he would cope, though, if the appeals prove unsuccessful, Winrow said he will survive.

“I’ve got strong family ties,” he said resolutely. “Just as I lived on the street, I’ll live in here.”