Pubdate: Mon, 07 Jan 2013
Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal (NV)
Copyright: 2013 Las Vegas Review-Journal
Contact: http://www.reviewjournal.com/about/print/press/letterstoeditor.html
Website: http://www.lvrj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/233
Author: Jacob Sullum, Creators Syndicate

POT GROWER'S COURAGE EXPOSES INSANITY OF MANDATORY MINIMUMS

Chris Williams, a Montana medical marijuana grower, faces at least
five years in federal prison when he is sentenced Feb. 1. The penalty
seems unduly severe, especially because his business openly supplied
marijuana to patients who were allowed to use it under state law.

Yet five years is a cakewalk compared with the sentence Williams
originally faced, which would have kept the 38-year-old father behind
bars for the rest of his life. The difference is because of an
extremely unusual post conviction agreement that highlights the
enormous power prosecutors wield as a result of mandatory minimum
sentences so grotesquely unjust that in this case even they had to
admit it.

Of more than two dozen Montana medical marijuana providers who were
arrested following federal raids in March 2011, Williams is the only
one who insisted on his right to a trial. For that, he paid a steep
price.

Tom Daubert, one of Williams' partners in Montana Cannabis, which had
dispensaries in four cities, pleaded guilty to maintaining
drug-involved premises and got five years of probation. Another
partner, Chris Lindsey, took a similar deal and is expected to receive
similar treatment. Both testified against Williams at his trial in
September.

Williams' third partner, Richard Flor, pleaded guilty to the same
charge but did not testify against anyone. Flor, a sickly 68-year-old
suffering from multiple ailments, died four months into a five-year
prison term.

For a while, it seemed that Williams, who rejected a plea deal because
he did not think he had done anything wrong and because he wanted to
challenge federal interference with Montana's medical marijuana law,
also was destined to die in prison. Because marijuana is prohibited
for all purposes under federal law, he was not allowed even to discuss
the nature of his business in front of the jury, so his conviction on
the four drug charges he faced, two of which carried five-year
mandatory minimums, was more or less inevitable.

Stretching Williams' sentence from mindlessly harsh to mind-bogglingly
Draconian, each of those marijuana counts was tied to a charge of
possessing a firearm during a drug-trafficking offense, based on guns
at the Helena grow operation that Williams supervised and at Flor's
home in Miles City, which doubled as a dispensary. Federal law
prescribes a fiveyear mandatory minimum for the first such offense and
25 years for each subsequent offense, with the sentences to run
consecutively.

Consequently, when Williams was convicted on all eight counts, he
faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 80 years for the gun charges
alone, even though he never handled the firearms cited in his
indictment, let alone hurt anyone with them. This result, which
federal prosecutors easily could have avoided by bringing different
charges, was so absurdly disproportionate that U.S. Attorney Michael
Cotter offered Williams a deal.

Drop your appeal, Cotter said, and we'll drop enough charges so that
you might serve "as little as 10 years." No dice, said Williams, still
determined to challenge the Obama administration's assault on medical
marijuana providers. But when Cotter came back with a better offer,
involving a five-year mandatory minimum, Williams took it, having
recognized the toll his legal struggle was taking on his 16-year-old
son, a student at Montana State University.

"I think everyone in the federal system realizes that these mandatory
minimum sentences are unjust," Williams tells me during a call from
the Missoula County Detention Facility. But for prosecutors, they
serve an important function: "They were basically leveraging this
really extreme sentence against something that was so light because
they wanted to force me into taking a plea deal." Nine out of 10
federal criminal cases end in guilty pleas.

The efficient transformation of defendants into prisoners cannot be
the standard by which we assess our justice system. If the possibility
of sending someone like Chris Williams to prison for the rest of his
life is so obviously unfair, why does the law allow it, let alone
mandate it? 
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