One Man’s Slip-Up With Crack: 10 Years in Prison

By all accounts, Johnny F. Patillo spent less than a few hours in the crack trade. It was an odd departure from his usual behavior, stunning friends, relatives, even a federal probation officer who called his crime “out of character.”

Nothing about the young’s man life--his degree from junior college, his days on the football team at Utah State University, a steady employment history--indicated that he would ever be sentenced to 10 years in prison for drug trafficking.

But Patillo, a 27-year-old African American with no prior record, is among those who have been hit by tough mandatory federal sentences aimed at drug traffickers who distribute or sell even small amounts of crack cocaine.

These penalties have been directed at some major dealers, but also at low-level street peddlers or couriers like Patillo, who was caught mailing a package of crack. All the defendants convicted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles have been minorities, records show.

U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts, a conservative Ronald Reagan appointee, was so outraged by federal sentencing rules requiring him to imprison Patillo for 10 years that he took the unusual step of requesting a presidential pardon for the young man.

It is a bold move that symbolizes much of the federal judiciary’s opposition to the harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences enacted by Congress in the late 1980s.

Patillo was arrested in January, 1992, when a police dog sniffed out a package of crack cocaine he was trying to mail at a Federal Express office at Los Angeles International Airport. Containing about 680 grams of crack, the shipment was worth about $175,000 on the street.

Patillo pleaded guilty to the crime and told Letts he thought the package probably contained drugs, but steadfastly denied knowing it was crack cocaine.

If it were not for a drastic salary cut in his job managing a collection agency as well as his mounting debts, Patillo said, he never would have accepted a neighbor’s offer of $500 to mail the package.

“All that was happening at one time, and I made the mistake,” said Patillo in a telephone interview from the federal prison camp at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. “I have been around a lot of drugs in my life, but I never chose to go that way, except for that day.”

Despite an effort to find a way around the mandatory penalties, Letts sent Patillo to prison just before Christmas in 1992. The judge lamented that his hands were tied under a rigid 1986 statute that sets a mandatory 10-year sentence for anyone convicted of distributing at least 50 grams of crack, or about two ounces.

Letts also lodged a formal protest in the court record.

“Congress,” he declared, “decided to hit the problem of drugs, as they saw it, with a sledgehammer, making no allowance for the circumstances of any particular case . . . it would make no difference if the day before making one slip in an otherwise unblemished life, the defendant had rescued 15 children from a burning building or had won the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

Letts said in an interview that Patillo deserved a couple years in jail, but not 10. “It was the worst thing to do for that young man,” he said. “If justice can ever prevail in this case, I would like to help make it happen.”

In state court, a charge of trafficking in crack cocaine carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, but some defendants, especially first-time offenders, receive no more than a year in jail and probation.

In federal prison, Patillo works in the kitchen eight hours a day. He is also president of the Black Cultural Workshop, which arranges classes for inmates. During the evening, he takes courses offered at the prison by the University of Nevada.

“I can’t get my hopes up too high,” said Patillo of his pending appeal for clemency. “I just have to wait and see what happens. I am just trying to keep motivated.”