Dealer Called Victim of Poor Legal Advice : Courts: Attorney says his client, serving a life term in cocaine case, deserves leniency because botched defenses led to his repeat-offender status.

A high-powered criminal defense lawyer pleaded with three federal appellate judges Monday to show leniency toward his client, a small-time Southeast Los Angeles drug dealer who is facing life in federal prison.

Attorney Oscar Goodman of Las Vegas said that “fundamental fairness” demands that Richard V. Winrow’s sentence of life without possibility of parole be overturned.

Winrow received the sentence in December, 1989. A year earlier, police arrested him at his mother’s Willowbrook home with 5.5 ounces of crack cocaine wrapped in 17 plastic bags, a loaded .357 magnum, $3,209 in cash and a scale used for weighing drugs.

Winrow, now 23, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge David W. Williams under a 1988 federal law providing that repeat drug offenders with two prior felonies are to receive life terms in the event of a third felony conviction involving certain quantities of drugs. Winrow had 151.9 grams, three times the 50-gram threshold set by the statute.

Goodman on Monday told the appeals court that Winrow had been a victim of “some bad advice” from lawyers, including him.

The first instance was when Winrow agreed to plead guilty to state felonies involving small amounts of drugs in 1987, Goodman said. At the time, Goodman stressed, the repeat offender law was not on the books.

The second instance involved the case now before the court. Goodman said he spurned a July, 1989, offer from the U.S. attorney’s office to allow Winrow to plead guilty in return for a mandatory 17-year sentence. But Winrow then told his lawyer he wanted the deal, Goodman said.

However, when Goodman informed federal prosecutor Lisa B. Lench of Winrow’s choice, she told him her supervisor had withdrawn the initial proposal and was offering 21 years.

Winrow rejected the second offer, Goodman said. “He told me, ‘Go for the grits,’ ” meaning go to trial.

Lench did not address the issue of the deal in her oral arguments to judges Arthur L. Alarcon, James Browning and Thomas Nelson.

However, Chief Assistant U.S. Atty. Terree A. Bowers said later in the day, “Our office did not offer a 17-year sentence to the defendant.”

The case has drawn nationwide attention because Winrow was the second person in the country sentenced under the repeat offender statute.

The plea bargain issue came to the fore even though Goodman, who has represented a number of high-profile criminal defendants including organized crime figures, had not raised it in his brief.

He said he is focusing on the negotiations because the Supreme Court undercut his primary argument--that the term violated the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

“My back is against the wall,” Goodman told the judges, because of a 1991 Supreme Court decision holding that virtually any sentence mandated by a legislature, short of capital punishment, would survive a constitutional challenge.

Federal prosecutor Lench said Winrow was a stronger candidate for a life term than Ronald Harmelin, the defendant in the 1991 Supreme Court case. He received a life term under a 1978 Michigan law that said anyone convicted of possessing 650 grams or more of cocaine could be sentenced to life without possibility of parole, even a first offender. She stressed that Harmelin only possessed drugs, whereas Winrow had been convicted of possessing drugs with intent to sell them.

She noted that Winrow had admitted to a police officer when arrested that he had been in the drug business for some time and that the money he was captured with was from drug deals.