Tag: informants
Posted on Wed Jan 23, 2008 at 01:31:00 PM EST
Tags: informants (all tags)
A federal judge in Cleveland has ordered 15 inmates released from long prison terms and more may be coming, due to an DEA informant's lies.
Collectively, the men have served at least 30 years behind bars. They were sentenced to a combined 86 years. Federal public defender Dennis Terez called the release of so many people at one time unprecedented.
Fallout from the case is expected to spread beyond the federal courthouses in Cleveland and Akron, where the men were convicted of dealing crack cocaine in Mansfield.
Uncorroborated snitch testimony is inherently unreliable and our system has depended on it for far too long.
The case is a blow to the federal justice system, which relies heavily on informant-based testimony, lawyers said. The men, some with no prior run-ins with the law, were given long prison sentences based almost exclusively on the word of informant Jerrell Bray and Lee Lucas, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who supervised Bray.
An investigation is ongoing into the conduct of the DEA Agent Lee Lucas who supervised the informant.
Also revealing is that most of the inmates to be released pleaded guilty. Here's why. [more...]
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Posted on Tue Dec 11, 2007 at 01:05:45 PM EST
Tags: crack cocaine penalties, mandatory minimums, informants (all tags)
Update: The Commission has unanimously voted for retroactivity. Press Release is here. Reaction and newer post here.
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[Note: This is a long post, covering the issues of the guidelines, mandatory minimums, the informant system of sentence reduction and the need for Congress to act to change the law.]
The U.S. Sentencing Commission will vote today on whether to make the recently enacted small (two level) guideline reduction for crack cocaine offenses retroactive so that some of the 19,500 inmates currently serving federal crack sentences can benefit from it. It is widely expected they will vote for retroactivity and I'll update and bump this post when they do.
The thing to remember is, this doesn't solve the problem. The much bigger problem is with mandatory minimum sentences. Only Congress can change those. Neither yesterday's Supreme Court decisions nor the guideline reduction addresses this problem. Today, like yesterday, judges are powerless to go below the 5 or 10 (or in some cases 20) year mandatory minimum sentence unless the defendant cooperates with the Government and the Government asks the judge to impose a lower sentence. The judge can't do it on his own -- or at the request of a defendant. That's just wrong-headed.
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