Pubdate: Mon, 23 Dec 2013 Source: Columbus Dispatch (OH) Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Contact: http://www.dispatch.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/93 Author: Dan Barry, New York Times INMATE ASKS OBAMA FOR LENIENCY IN LIFE TERM GREENVILLE, Ill. - A lifer with a pen sat in the 65-square-foot cell he shares. A calendar taunted from a bulletin board. He began to write. Dear President Obama. He acknowledged his criminal past. He expressed remorse. And he pleaded for a second chance, now that he had served 18 years of the worst sentence short of execution: life without parole, for a nonviolent first offense. Mr. President, he wrote, you are my final hope. Sincerely, Jesse Webster. Eleven-hundred men reside in medium security at a remote federal prison in Greenville in southern Illinois. Most come and go, sentences served. Others stay, their legal appeals exhausted, their only hope to take up a pen and enter the long-shot lottery of executive clemency with a salutation that begins: Dear President Obama. The prisoners are men like Webster, 46, a former cocaine dealer from the South Side of Chicago. Webster, who is bald, stocky and bespectacled, discussed his case several days ago in the spare visitors room at Greenville. "I should have done time," Webster said. "But a living death sentence?" He grew up in a family of seven barely surviving on his stepfather's job as a parking-lot attendant. Dropping out of ninth grade to make money for the household, he wound up buffing at a carwash favored by a big-tipping drug dealer. Seeing hustle in 16-year-old Jesse's eyes, he offered the boy a job as his driver, $200 a week. He became a low-key freelancer in a hooked-up world. In 1995, though, he learned that the law was looking for him, so he decided to turn himself in. Prosecutors offered leniency on the condition that Webster become a confidential informant against a powerful drug gang. He declined, which Matthew Crowl, a prosecutor in his case, described many years later as a reasonable decision, given that the gang had already killed an informant. Webster was convicted of participating in a drug conspiracy and filing false tax returns. His sentence of life without parole left his mother weeping and his brother's heart dropping to the floor. For a sentence like that, the inmate said, "I thought I'd have to hurt somebody, do bodily harm." The federal judge, James Zagel, explained to the court that he was adhering to the mandatorily harsh sentencing guidelines of the day. "To put it in simple terms," the judge said before imposing sentence, "it's too high." If it were 1986 or today, Webster probably would be sentenced to serve about 25 years. But he was sentenced in 1996, during a period when sentencing guidelines gave federal judges virtually no discretion in assessing punishment. "That was at the peak of mandatory sentencing," said Vanita Gupta, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU - which highlighted Webster's case among dozens of others, in a recent report on lifers - estimates that more than 2,000 federal inmates are serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses. What's more, in a sample study of 169 federal inmates incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, the organization found dozens who were first-time offenders, plus many others who had only misdemeanors and juvenile infractions in their past. And this was only in the federal prison system. "We kind of lost our moral center, and any sense of proportionality in our sentencing," during the so-called war on drugs, Gupta said. "The result was the throwing away of certain people's lives - predominantly black and brown people's lives." Webster, who is African-American, spent 16 years in federal maximum security prisons, including Leavenworth. In July 2011, finally, he won a transfer to relative tranquility, in Greenville. "Took me 17 years to get here," he said. All the while, Webster knows that the associates who testified against him have been free for years. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom