Beth Curtis whose brother is serving
two life terms plus 20 years for marijuana.
Who
We
Are
When I started the website Life for Pot in December of 2008 my main goal was to find federal nonviolent inmates who had received the sentence of life without parole. After finding several, I found that they all had elements in common.
Those elements were:
They all had exercised the Sixth Amendment right to trial
They had all been charged with conspiracy with the evidence being cooperating witnesses testifying for a plea agreement
It seemed as if a high % of these inmates had been charged and convicted in southern Circuits - with the 11th circuit leading
Our purpose is to find
nonviolent marijuana prisoners
who have been sentenced to
LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE
and to advocate for
their immediate release.
We will now aggressively look for nonviolent marijuana offenders serving sentences of life without parole or defacto life sentences. For our purposes, anyone who has served 10 years and will not be released before the age of 60 will be considered an inmate with a
de facto life sentence.
Who We Serve
The exceptionally long sentencing of nonviolent drug offenders is just one of the reasons why the United States now incarcerates 25 % of the world's inmates when our population is only 5 % of the world’s population.
We believe that this is in part determined by the nature of our Conspiracy Laws. Conspiracy is a charging instrument that is not used in most developed countries. Another reason for our extraordinary sentencing is that when defendants choose to go to trial they are given sentences for 3 to 6 times longer than if they take a plea.
We search for prisoners in the Federal System as well as State Systems.
We intend to determine what percent of these nonviolent marijuana offenders:
Were charged with conspiracy
Exercised their Right to Trial
Were sentenced in each Circuit Court.
The two graphs on this page are courtesy of Dennis Cauchon, who is the editor of The Clemency Report