Pubdate: Thu, 02 May 2002 Source: Star-Ledger (NJ) Webpage: www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-1/102033060582759.xml Copyright: 2002 Newark Morning Ledger Co Contact: http://www.nj.com/starledger/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/424 Author: Bob Johnson, Associated Press DRUG 'LIFER' GETS SECOND CHANCE AND GOES FREE BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- A woman who was sentenced to life without parole for a first-time drug offense was released yesterday after spending five years in prison. About two hours after a judge reduced her sentence to time served, Theresa Wilson, 34, walked out of the Jefferson County Jail, arm in arm with her husband. "You've gotten a second chance. Don't blow it," Judge Tommy Nail said at her hearing. Wilson became a poster child for critics of mandatory sentencing in 1998, when she was ordered to spend the rest of her life in prison because of a law that branded her a "drug baron" when she sold a morphine mixture for $150. The 1986 law mandated the sentence because the mixture weighed more than 56 grams. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals last year ruled 3-2 that the life sentence for a first drug offense was cruel and unusual punishment, sending the case to Nail for a new sentence. Wilson will be on probation for three years. She declined to comment as she left the jail with her family. "This has been real tough on the kids," husband James Wilson said. He said he has been raising their two teenage children but "can't be a mother to them." Wilson says she's changed since her arrest in 1996 for selling the drug to an undercover police officer. At the time, she said, she was a drug addict who didn't care about anything after her mother's death. She was convicted in March 1998 and given the life sentence by now-retired Judge J. Richmond Pearson. "Judge Pearson only did what he had to do. He sat up there with tears in his eyes," she said. "I was never angry. Just disappointed in the justice system." Wilson's attorneys, Mark White and Bill Bowen, said they took her case for free to right an injustice. During Wilson's brief hearing, White said her five years in prison were about double what is normal for someone convicted of a first drug distribution offense in Alabama. White said Wilson's life sentence demonstrates the problem with legislation that calls for mandatory sentences and takes discretion away from judges. Wilson has said she plans to work as a church secretary and eventually wants to become a drug recovery counselor. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth