Fighting Cancer--and Time : Family Fears Illness Will Claim Costa Mesa Man Before Sentence Ends

For six years, Charles Larsen’s children have patiently counted the days until his release from federal prison. Now, with barely a month to go, they fear the cancer may kill him first.

Larsen, in prison for skippering a ship used to smuggle marijuana from Thailand, has terminal cancer and would be a likely candidate for a so-called compassionate release allowing him to die at home. Even the prosecutor who put the 51-year-old Costa Mesa man behind bars would let him go home now.

But there is one problem: The law governing such mercy discharges excludes certain prisoners, such as Larsen, whose felony crimes were committed before Nov. 1, 1987. Larsen missed that cutoff date by just four months.

The ban has tied the hands of prison officials who say Larsen’s condition is hopeless--advanced cancer was found on his pancreas and liver two weeks ago--and thrown his family into a desperate search for some other way to free him soon.

“They told me everything in my CAT-scan looked real bad. There was nothing they can do,” Larsen said in a telephone interview from the medical wing of the U.S. Penitentiary at Lompoc. “Some days are OK. Most of them are bad.”

Although doctors have not said how long Larsen is likely to live, his two daughters spend their days barraging government officials with telephone calls and sleepless nights staving off their worst fears.

“I’m finally having this baby and he might not be around to see it,” said daughter Michelle Olson, 31, of Mission Viejo, due to give birth to her first child in late September.

Prison officials plan to move Larsen to an undisclosed halfway house in Orange County on Sept. 25 to serve out the final six months of his prison term. And he could be eligible for release to home confinement within a few weeks of the transfer, said Todd R. Craig, administrator of the Lompoc prison’s satellite camp where Larsen has spent most of his six years in custody.

But Larsen’s daughters say a halfway house is a poor environment for a cancer patient and his attorney worries Larsen might not be accepted if his condition worsens. His family holds out hope they might be able to treat him at home using herbal remedies.

“If we get him home one day early, our work is done. That’s one more day with us,” said another of Larsen’s daughters, Holly Doan, a 28-year-old artist in Newport Beach. “We don’t want the story to end the way it looks like it’s going to.”

Larsen, facing his second brush with cancer in a year, faces a Catch-22 in his bid for early freedom. It takes an action by the sentencing judge to grant such a release, but the judge must first have a request by the federal prison system. In Larsen’s case, though, the prison is barred by federal sentencing law from petitioning for the compassionate release because his crime preceded the Nov. 1, 1987, cutoff by several months.

That cutoff date was set when a package of new federal sentencing laws was passed in the 1980s. The old law did not provide for compassionate release for prisoners convicted of crimes too serious for parole, although the new one does.

As a convict whose crime preceded Nov. 1, 1987, and who is ineligible for parole, Larsen falls into a category that includes about 2% of the prison system’s 100,000 inmates, said Thomas Metzger, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons.

“It does create an anomalous situation where the prison can’t discharge a person they think deserves a compassionate release and the judge is divested of the discretion to release someone who deserves a release,” said Larsen’s attorney, Ronald Muntean.

“Someone could have committed murder a day after the law went into effect and have 20 years left, and they’d get out. It’s stupid,” Doan said.

Larsen’s relatives, including a son who lives in Britain, are hoping instead that U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall in Los Angeles can find a way around the legal conundrum, such as by freeing him on grounds that continued imprisonment amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and a violation of his rights. Marshall was out of town and could not be reached for comment.

The prosecutor who put Larsen behind bars does not oppose an early release, but said there appears no legal way to do so.

“There really wasn’t a legal way for [Marshall] to get there from here,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Jacqueline Chooljian said.

Craig, the prison-camp administrator, said Larsen’s condition is stable and that officials are keeping a close eye on him. “We’re very sensitive to his case. We’re closely monitoring it,” Craig said.

And he said the prison granted Larsen the maximum six months stay at the halfway house as an alternative to finishing his sentence at the prison.

“We’ve given Mr. Larsen fair play,” Craig said.

Larsen, who is divorced, was convicted in 1990 as part of a massive marijuana smuggling operation that authorities described at the time as one of the world’s three or four largest rings. Larsen, who skippered a ship used to shuttle tons of marijuana from Thailand, spent more than a year as a fugitive before being arrested at a restaurant as the family celebrated his daughter Michelle’s 26th birthday.

He was sentenced to a mandatory 10 years in federal prison after being convicted on drug-trafficking charges.

For Larsen’s daughters, the discovery of a new outbreak of cancer hit like a broken vow--just as they expected him to rejoin the family after six years of missed graduations and weddings.

“It’s a really ugly ending to a really sad story,” Doan said. “We’ve lived through all that and now he’s ready to come home and now this happens.”

Larsen, who already suffered from diabetes, was first found to have cancer of the pancreas in September, 1994. He was sent to a federal medical center in Rochester, Minn., and underwent surgery at the nearby Mayo Clinic, according to a report by his prison physician. Larsen received radiation therapy and chemotherapy at the federal center and was moved back to the Lompoc camp in February.

Larsen, who lost 90 pounds through the ordeal, appeared to be on the road to recovery after his return, resuming his job on the camp farm.

But the cancer was creeping back. A follow-up examination in August turned up evidence of a new outgrowth on the pancreas, and it had already spread to the liver. The physician declared the cancer to be extensive and untreatable.

Larsen called home two weeks ago to deliver the news.

“He goes, ‘It’s back,’ ” Doan said. “He was crying and I was crying. I said, ‘This isn’t what was supposed to happen.’ ”