Equal Justice Matters Wall (T)
Taylor, Tyrone
Thompson, Landon
Tyler, Timothy
Tyrone Taylor
TYRONE TAYLOR
Taylor told the ACLU that he was “never a person to disregard the law” but found himself “selling drugs as a source of survival.” In September 1983, when he was 16 years old, Taylor snatched a woman’s purse containing less than $100 worth of property and lacerated the woman’s arm in the commission of the crime. He pleaded guilty to robbery and aggravated battery, and served two years in a youth offender camp.
When he was 22 years old, Taylor was convicted of possession of cocaine and two counts of cocaine trafficking in Polk County and Hillsborough County. His juvenile conviction was used to enhance his sentence, and he was accordingly sentenced to LWOP under Florida’s habitual offender law for one of the cocaine trafficking charges, for knowingly possessing, selling, delivering, or manufacturing between 28 and 200 grams of cocaine. At the time of his sentencing, Taylor did not know how to read or write.
Taylor appealed his conviction, arguing that his one prior youthful conviction could not be used to give him an enhanced sentence as a violent habitual offender. The Second District Court of Appeal of Florida remanded the case for further consideration, but his sentence was reaffirmed. According to the criminal punishment code score sheet calculated for sentencing purposes, the recommended sentence for Taylor was nine to twelve years.
In the 24 years since Taylor has been imprisoned, he says all his family and friends have either stopped visiting him or died. Now 46 years old, he has no one outside the prison walls to speak with. Taylor said that it is hard “day in and day out knowing you may die in prison. It can drive you to some crazy thoughts.” One year ago, while he was asleep in the middle of the night, Taylor reports he was assaulted by another inmate, causing a serious eye injury. He describes his more than two decades of incarceration as “crazy,” and said, “I’m still in shock 24 years later, and my mental level has took a beating.” He tries to study law and pray in prison, but says he has trouble finding activities to occupy his time, since, he told the ACLU, prisoners serving life sentences are not eligible for most educational programs. “So here I sit just waiting to die in prison,” he said.
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 145).
LANDON THOMPSON
A tenth-grade dropout, Thompson began to use illegal drugs in his early teens. According to the trial court, he lived in an abusive and unstable family environment, and his youth was marked by suicide attempts and jail and prison stays. He served as a confidential informant for the FBI’s Violent Crime Task Force, for which he conducted six undercover drug transactions. During his association with drug users and dealers through his work on behalf of the FBI to prosecute others for drug offenses, Thompson relapsed and began to use drugs again. He resorted to selling small amounts of crack cocaine at a time, over a period of weeks, out of a hotel room in a run-down section of Richmond, Virginia.
Thompson, who is Black, was arrested in May 2009. At trial, the government’s four non-law-enforcement witnesses were women who, like Thompson, were users and sellers of crack and heroin. His first trial ended in a hung jury; after a second trial, he was convicted of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 50 grams or more of crack cocaine. Although he had only 3.57 grams of crack on him at the time of his arrest, he was held responsible for 50 grams or more of crack based on testimony of others. Prior to trial, he had rejected a plea offer for a 20-year sentence.
Because it was Thompson’s third felony drug offense, he was sentenced to mandatory life without parole. The district court judge, Judge James R. Spencer, who has served on the federal trial bench for 25 years and was a highly respected federal prosecutor prior to his appointment to the bench, told Thompson at the sentencing hearing, “I think a life sentence for what you have done in this case is ridiculous. It is a travesty. I don’t have any discretion about it. The government, obviously you irritated them in some way and they reached back to these 1996 possession and possession with intent [convictions] to do this, which under the law they have the right to do. I don’t agree with it, either. And I want the world and the record to be clear on that. This is just silly. But as I say, I don’t have any choice.”
Two weeks after imposing the mandatory LWOP sentence, the district court identified a flaw in information provided by the government and reduced Thompson’s sentence to 25 years, but the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the mandatory life sentence. In a concurring opinion, Judge Andre M. Davis of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that he was dismayed by the mandatory LWOP sentence the court was required to give Thompson:
“[M]any would say that [the defendant] seems to be one more of the drug war’s “expendables”…. This case presents familiar facts seen in courts across the country: a defendant addicted to narcotics selling narcotics in order to support his habit. Unfortunately for [the defendant] and countless other poorly-educated, drug-dependent offenders, current drug prosecution and sentencing policy mandates that he spend the rest of his life in prison…”
“Here, as in many other cases, the district court expressly noted its discontent with the statutory mandatory minimum sentence. This disapproval among distinguished jurists is not unusual. [ ] I share the district judge’s dismay over the legally mandated sentence he must impose in this case. While the controlling legal principles require us to order the reimposition of a sentence of life without parole in this case, the time has long passed when policymakers should come to acknowledge the nation’s failed drug policy and to act on that acknowledgement. As a nation, we are smart enough to do better.”
Thompson, now 42, has served four years of his life-without-parole sentence. His wife told the ACLU, “They destroyed our lives, basically—not just his, but mine as well, and our children’s as well. It’s a shame that it had to even go that far. That type of sentence for personal use is uncalled for.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 94).
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Timothy Tyler with his mother and sister.
TIMOTHY TYLER
Tyler grew up in Connecticut with his mother, stepfather, and sister; as a teenager, he says he moved to Florida to live with his father and escape physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather. After graduating from high school, he traveled around the country to follow the Grateful Dead and became a regular user of LSD. According to Tyler, LSD was a spiritual sacrament to him, and he overdosed on the drug several times, triggering episodes of mental illness that required hospitalization in mental health institutions. He sold fried dough at Grateful Dead concerts and would feed other Deadheads for free when they could not afford food.
In 1991, when Tyler was 21, he was arrested twice for selling small amounts of LSD and received probation both times. In May 1992, he sold marijuana and LSD to a friend who had become a confidential informant and was setting up drug buys for federal law enforcement in exchange for a lighter sentence. Five times over the course of two months, Tyler mailed hits of LSD to the informant; he says he believed he was sharing a spiritual experience with a friend and remained unaware he was being set up. In August 1992, when he was 23, he was arrested and charged with three co-defendants, including his father.
Tyler pleaded guilty to possession of LSD with intent to distribute and conspiracy to possess LSD with intent to distribute. According to Tyler, his public defender told him pleading guilty would get him a reduced sentence of 21 years. Instead, he was sentenced to mandatory life without parole on each count because of his two previous convictions and the amount of LSD he was convicted of selling. Because the judge counted the weight of the “carrier” paper the LSD was placed on in addition to the 5.2 grams of LSD, Tyler was held accountable for selling more than 10 grams of LSD, a threshold amount that triggers a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole on a third offense.
Tyler reports he was never made aware of the fact that there was a mandatory minimum life-without-parole sentence before he pleaded guilty. As the sentence was mandatory, the judge could not consider Tyler’s drug addiction, lack of violent conduct, mental health issues, or young age. Without the mandatory minimum based on his prior offenses, Tyler would have received a sentence of 262 to 327 months under the federal sentencing guidelines.
Tyler attempted to file a pro se motion for post-conviction relief based on ineffective assistance of counsel, which was denied because the filing deadline had passed. His father was sentenced to 10 years and died in prison in 2001. The informant was sentenced to 10 years in return for his cooperation.
Tyler has served almost 21 years in prison. He told the ACLU that he “lost [his] mind” after his first 10 years in prison. He has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for which he has been periodically hospitalized in mental health institutions since he was a teenager. After more than a decade in prison, he was transferred to Springfield Mental Hospital for treatment for a year; he returned to prison afterward. Despite his mental illness, he has been repeatedly held in isolation. He was recently held in isolation due to a prison-wide lockdown following the murder of a prison guard. As a result of the stress of isolation and being deprived of essential contact with his family, he told the ACLU he suffered a mental breakdown in March 2013, during which he was banging his head against the walls, singing at the top of his lungs while naked, and spreading feces on himself.
In addition, Tyler came out as gay five years ago, and he says he struggled with isolation and fear of becoming a target for violence. During the first two years after he came out, he reports he never went to the dining room to eat for fear he would be assaulted. He says he became depressed and nearly took his own life because of the isolation that followed his coming out.
Tyler says of his sentence, “Life, it says, but life means you die in prison.” His sister, Carrie Tyler-Stoafer, who talks with her brother every other day and calls him her best friend, told the ACLU that Tyler struggles to cope with his sentence to die in prison. She said, “If he had a release date he could look forward to—he has nothing to look forward to, no release date—it would change everything. He was looking forward to 2012, the end of the world, because at least he would get out. For a decade, he was looking forward to that date, and he was so disappointed when it didn’t happen. He keeps his hope alive by using his mind to play tricks on himself…. A release date would keep him going to help him get through this.” She explained of her brother’s sentence, “It’s worse than a death in your family, and I’ve lost a lot of loved ones. It’s never-ending because he’s still there and your heart just keeps breaking over and over.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 83).
*Timothy’s sentence was ultimately commuted by President Obama after serving more than 24 years behind bars.