The Washington Post
PORTLAND, Ore. — When the judge entered the wood-paneled courtroom to begin the sentencing hearing this fall, 19-year-old Morgan Brittain was the only one who didn’t stand. She remained seated in her wheelchair in the front row.
Brittain looked in many ways like the girl she once was: Nike sneakers with hot pink laces, nails painted maroon and silver. She still had the slender frame of the dancer and runner she was before she overdosed two years ago on a half a gram of heroin she split with a friend.
The drugs had done serious harm. A younger cousin had to read Brittain’s statement to the judge on her behalf:
“I constantly feel like a burden on everyone because of all the things I can’t do: walk, talk easily, feed myself, bathe myself, drive, draw or even write this statement out. . . . The damage it has caused to my family and I is too much to even begin to describe.”
Brittain and her family had come to court to face German Tovar-Ramos, a man authorities described as a key supplier in the organization that sold the heroin to Brittain’s friend.
Within days, police arrested Tovar-Ramos because investigators and prosecutors had threatened people on lower rungs of the organization with stiff mandatory sentences: A girl is on life-support, they said; help us get to the higher-level traffickers, or you could end up in federal court facing 20 years in prison.
In court, prosecutors portrayed Tovar-Ramos as a high-level drug dealer who moved pounds of heroin every week. His defense attorney argued that his client was no more than a glorified delivery boy, and certainly not a kingpin.
When it was his turn to speak, Tovar-Ramos rose to apologize, dressed in a gray-striped county jail uniform. “I am very sorry about everything I have done to this family,” he said in Spanish, looking straight ahead at the judge. “I was simply trying to help out my own family.”
RELIED UPON BY PROSECUTORS
The story of how Tovar-Ramos was apprehended illustrates how heavily prosecutors rely on mandatory minimum sentences to take down drug networks. But this leverage could soon be diminished because of concerns that it has been used too liberally to lock up low-level nonviolent offenders who face punishments that are much more severe than their crimes.
A broad coalition – including President Obama, Koch Industries, the American Civil Liberties Union and some police chiefs and district attorneys – is calling for the country to recalibrate the scales of justice, especially when it comes to the harsh drug sentences that have driven a decades-long surge in the U.S. prison population. Many advocates say that the war on drugs has led to needlessly long prison terms. The policies have disproportionately affected minority communities, since so many of those incarcerated have been black or Latino.
Legislation introduced this month in the House and Senate would shorten the length of some mandatory minimums created in the 1980s onward and would give judges more leeway in sentencing. The Senate version was recently approved by the Judiciary Committee, but no vote has been scheduled yet.
Defense attorneys and others pushing to reduce mandatory sentences say that the threat of decades in prison leaves defendants without a choice at the plea bargaining table. Advocates for sentencing reform have also said that judges should have the flexibility to better match prison sentences with the threat defendants pose to public safety.
Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates has expressed the administration’s support for legislation to reduce some mandatory penalties and said prosecutors and investigators could still effectively do their jobs without such sentences.
SENTENCES AND LEVERAGE
But some prosecutors and other law enforcement officials are lobbying against the changes, saying the legislation will make it harder for them to dismantle criminal organizations or uncover other crimes, including homicides.
“The leverage, the hammer we have comes in those penalties,” said federal prosecutor Steven H. Cook, who is part of a group of law enforcement officials who oppose the sentencing reform legislation. “It is the one and only tool we have on the other side.”
In Oregon, federal prosecutors said they had no interest in taking sides in a politically sensitive policy debate. They agreed, however, to talk specifically about how and why they have repeatedly relied on mandatory prison sentences to respond to a heroin epidemic that nationally accounts for more than 8,250 overdose deaths a year.
Morgan Brittain was nearly one of them.
In May 2013, Brittain was a junior in high school, struggling with addiction just as her mother had. After two months at an in-patient treatment program, she was excited about coming home to her grandmother’s house on a weekend pass.
That night, after a few text messages back and forth with a friend, Brittain paid her $45 for part of a plastic bag containing half a gram of black tar heroin, the size of a pencil eraser. Then she smoked it.
Brittain’s grandmother, Ann Linenko, awoke on Mother’s Day to the crying screams of her two young grandchildren. They had found Brittain unconscious on the bedroom floor. Her lips were purple. She would spend the next four months in a coma.
Brittain was not expected to live. Her family was days away from taking her off a respirator. Slowly, that August, she began to regain some brain function.
By then, law enforcement officials had already figured out the source of the heroin.
On the morning of her overdose, police relied on the text messages and interviews with Brittain’s family to track down the friend who provided the drug.
The friend pointed police to the street-level dealer, who was arrested the next day after a drug sale monitored by police.
What matters most in these cases is not the amount of drugs sold, but that a person died or was seriously harmed from the drugs that came from a specific dealer. Investigators quickly leapfrog up the organization because the low-level players are willing to cooperate when they learn about the 20-year-mandatory penalty, a potent provision of the anti-drug trafficking law.
TWENTY-YEAR MINIMUM
Congress created the 20-year mandatory minimum penalty in 1986 just months after University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias overdosed on cocaine. The provision, informally named after Bias, allows prosecutors to implicate an entire drug-trafficking enterprise – every step up the ladder from street dealer to supplier – if they can determine that the drugs the operation sold caused the overdose.
Proving that an overdose is the result of a particular drug from a specific dealer is often difficult. Local police must investigate fatal overdoses as potential homicides, collecting cellphone data, fingerprints and other evidence. The medical examiner is quickly called in to determine the likely cause of death.
IThe legislation under consideration in Congress would not modify the 20-year mandatory penalty that applies in overdose cases. But the bills would undercut the threat of a 10-year mandatory minimum for a kilo or more of heroin, for instance, because a judge would have the discretion to drop the sentence to five years for certain defendants.
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