Mandatory Sentencing Backlash Builds

Theresa Wilson--a first-time, nonviolent drug offender--tried to sell a prescription medication to an undercover police officer for $150 back in 1998. She was tried as a “drug baron” under this state’s strict narcotics laws, and sentenced to life in prison.

On Wednesday, the 34-year-old mother of two got perhaps the first break of her life. She was freed.

“You’ve gotten a second chance,” said Jefferson County Circuit Judge Tommy Nail. “Don’t blow it.”

To many, Wilson had become a symbol of the high price of mandatory sentencing. And her release is the latest in a series of events challenging those laws.

Intended to target drug kingpins, many mandatory minimum laws, as they’re known, more often have sent addicts, drug dealers’ girlfriends and college kids peddling marijuana to prison for long terms.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases, probably in the fall, challenging California’s three-strikes law, the toughest of its kind in the nation.

Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a former federal prosecutor, and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) are pushing a bill that would ease mandatory sentences for those who played a minimal role in a drug transaction. (Neither lawmaker is known for being easy on criminals.)

Louisiana, Michigan, Connecticut, North Dakota, Utah, Washington state, Iowa and Mississippi also have rolled back at least some of their mandatory minimum statutes in the last year or two.

They have rolled them back to prevent more cases like Wilson’s.

“This is an extreme example, but it just shows that mandatory sentencing doesn’t work,” Wilson’s attorney, Bill Bowen, said a few hours after his client went free. “Mandatory sentencing is based on the premise that people all came from the same cookie-cutter, and they didn’t.”

In 1996, Wilson--a junior high school dropout--was losing all control, she said in the only interview since her incarceration, in the Birmingham News this week.

The product of a troubled household, she drank too much, had become addicted to prescription painkillers after a medical problem, was deeply in debt and had marital problems. Then her mother died, she said. Then the state took custody of her two children.

Unable to pay a $95 electricity bill, she got a vial of a prescription morphine solution from a neighbor whose late husband had used the painkiller while undergoing cancer treatments.

During a secretly taped conversation with an undercover police officer posing as a drug buyer, Wilson said she had no idea what the morphine was worth. So she offered to sell it for $150. She would keep $80 for herself, she said, and give $70 to the neighbor.

The police officer replied that he only had $80 with him. No problem, Wilson said on the tape; he could pay her whenever he had the money.

Wilson had no idea that the 97.8 grams of morphine solution had a street value of $10,000--or that the confluence of circumstances would land her desperate crime under a law intended to nab Alabama’s biggest drug traffickers.

“One of the problems with mandatory sentencing laws is that the low-level offenders are the most likely to be targeted,” said Monica Pratt of the Washington-based Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “Cooperation is often the only way to reduce your sentence, and since low-level offenders and addicts have no information to trade, they have nothing to offer prosecutors.”

As she awaited trial, Wilson reunited with her husband--who is now a minister--regained custody of her children and got a job as a church secretary.

In March 1998, Circuit Judge J. Richmond Pearson was visibly shaken when, saying he had no choice, he sentenced Wilson to spend the rest of her life in prison.

Last year, Wilson appealed. In August the state appellate court’s opinion came down.

Wilson’s sentence, wrote Judge Sue Bell Cobb, was “grossly disproportionate.”

The Alabama attorney general then appealed the case to the state Supreme Court. In April, the court agreed with the lower court’s decision.

Last week, Wilson was transported from Julia Tutwiler Prison in Wetumpka to the Jefferson County Jail to await Wednesday’s hearing.

In the courtroom, Nail allowed her to hug her husband and teenage children. Then he set her free.

A crying Wilson went back to the jail, signed her release papers, and headed for a welcome-home supper at her church.