Speaking of police corruption …
by digby
Ashleigh Banfield featured the reporter on this story on her program today and I’m sure few people saw it. It’s a fascinating look at a notorious Detroit drug dealer, arrested as a juvenile, who seems to have been kept in jail long past the expected expiration date because he informed on police:
I first happened upon White Boy Rick’s story last year and quickly became fascinated enough to call some of the police officers and federal agents who had figured in it in one way or another. With some surprise, I discovered that while most of them remembered the story in detail, few of them had any idea what had happened to Wershe since the Reagan administration. It was as if the legend of White Boy Rick had swallowed the real person at its center.
Except he wasn’t gone. I had first learned this from a column about incarceration policy published last year on The Fix, a site covering drugs and addiction. The author reported that Wershe was, in fact, more or less where people had last seen him in the late 1980s: sitting in a prison cell somewhere in Michigan.
This made Wershe not only a local icon but also an anomaly, and something of a mystery, in the world of criminal justice. In May 1987, when he was 17, Wershe was charged with possession with intent to deliver eight kilos of cocaine, which police had found stashed near his house following a traffic stop. He had the misfortune of being convicted and sentenced under one of the harshest drug statutes ever conceived in the United States, Michigan’s so-called 650 Lifer law, a 1978 act that mandated an automatic prison term of life without parole for the possession of 650 grams or more of cocaine. (The average time served for murder in state prisons in the 1980s was less than 10 years.)
Sentencing juvenile offenders to life without parole for non-homicide crimes was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, by which point such sentences were already exceedingly rare; the court was able to locate only 129 inmates serving them nationwide.
Michigan eventually acknowledged the failures of the 650 Lifer statute—the governor who signed it into law, William G. Milliken, has called it the greatest mistake of his career—and rolled it back in 1998. Those already serving time became parole eligible and began to be released. Wershe is the only person sentenced under the old law who is still in prison for a crime committed as a juvenile. Prominent and violent kingpins and enforcers from Wershe’s day in Detroit have long since been freed. And yet Wershe has remained incarcerated, for more than 26 years.
The Fix column, written by a prison activist who is himself serving a lengthy sentence for drug trafficking, quoted some of Wershe’s own explanations for his fate. He had been an informant for the FBI, he claimed, and his handlers had pushed him into the drug trade to serve their own ends. He had later run afoul of the local police by helping the FBI expose corrupt cops. “The FBI and police lied about this for more than two decades,” Wershe said. “I just want the truth to finally come out.”
Wershe’s claims seemed implausible, if not fantastical. But one detail near the end of the article caught my eye: a quote from a retired FBI agent named Gregg Schwarz. “The events surrounding the incarceration of Richard Wershe,” Schwarz said, “are a classic example of abuse of power and political corruption.” A former federal agent was backing the cause of the notorious White Boy Rick.
Apparently, it was widely known at the time that this fellow had been informing for the FBI. If you think that’s implausible, you haven’t been paying attention. Not to mention the way the FBI commonly coerces young people into committing crimes. In this case, it appears they used him for their purposes and then abandoned him allowing the Detroit cops to testify repeatedly at this parole hearings, keeping him in jail for years longer than anyone else in his position, even murderers.
This is a fascinating story with a current news hook: this week a judge ordered him to be resentenced.
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