Judge Reluctantly Gives Long Sentence in Minor Drug Case

Saying his hands were tied by a mandatory-minimum law, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Cassell in Salt Lake City, Utah, sentenced a 25-year-old small-time drug dealer to 55 years in prison.

Cassell was forced to impose the sentence on Weldon Angelos, the founder of the rap music label Extravagant Records, because Angelos twice had a gun in an ankle holster while selling small amounts of marijuana to undercover police.
"I have no choice," Judge Cassell said to Angelos in announcing the sentence. The judge described the sentence as "unjust, cruel, and even irrational" and urged Angelos to appeal his decision and ask President Bush for clemency once all appeals were exhausted.

Cassell also called on the U.S. Congress to repeal the law that made the sentence mandatory. He cited a case only two hours before Angelos' sentencing where he was legally required to impose only a 22-year sentence on a man convicted of aggravated second-degree murder for beating an elderly woman to death. That crime, said Cassell, was much more serious than the offenses committed by Angelos.

The case fuels the heated debate that questions the fairness of sending a minor drug dealer to prison for 55 years when a murderer, rapist, or terrorist, according to the same sentencing directives, receive no more than about 25 years. |||

Ore. Heroin Dealers Sentenced for OD Death

A couple in Salem, Ore., who supplied heroin to a man who died from an overdose are the first people in Oregon to be sentenced under a 1986 federal law that holds dealers responsible for a drug death.

When David Hoover was found dead last February after injecting heroin, a friend led police to his dealers, Jennifer Lynn Hanson, 26, and Jason Lee Welty, 30. Last week, the couple pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for selling the drugs that led to Hoover's death.
Hanson and Welty could have faced 20 years in prison under the Len Bias law, which was named for the 22-year-old University of Maryland basketball player who overdosed on cocaine in June 1986 after being drafted by the Boston Celtics.

However, under a plea bargain with prosecutors, Hanson and Welty face a maximum of 12 years in prison.
"It should send a message to dealers out there that there are consequences that can increase their time in jail considerably," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Bickers, the prosecutor in the case.
Local police don't use the Len Bias law often because it is difficult to trace a drug overdose to the source of the drugs. "The investigation is more difficult because you have to make the link between the narcotic and the drug dealer, and you are dealing with people who are no longer there to tell you who they purchased the narcotics from," Bickers said. |||