By the time criminal officers told William Forrester he had COVID-19, he had already lost his sense of smell and persistent headache, body tremors and diarrhea.
In his worst days, his abdominal cramps were so severe that he could not stand, his back pain was so severe that he could not bend down to eat.He said he had to ask a fellow inmate to bring him a coffee because his hands were shaking so hard.
One day he discovered himself as a lie on the shower floor as he struggled to catch his breath.His head will be filled with air. It’s troubling for Forrester, a 63-year-old man who lost a lung nearly two decades ago to cancer.
Forrester spent more than a decade in a Florida state criminal for forging opioid prescriptions for a year of addiction to painkillers after a lung operation.
His 15-year sentence was the product of mandatory minimum legislation developed years ago to combat the drug epidemic in the state.At the national level, mandatory minimum sentences require judges to impose default and lengthy sentences for certain crimes, many of which are nonviolent drug-related crimes.But lawyers and legal experts say harsh sentences treat drug addicts, like Forrester, as if they were violent pillars of drugs.
With less than a year of freedom, an imprisoned legislation that has since been amended, Forrester fears dying before being free.
“I hope I don’t sentence you to death, ” he said.
Under the federal system, more than 7,500 criminals were released after Attorney General William Barr ordered the government to move the elderly and vulnerable prisoners to space arrest.Among those allowed to serve the rest of their sentences under space arrest amid coronavirus fears were high-level criminals such as former Crusaders of President Donald Trump, Paul Manafort.
But critics say the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been slow to put Barr’s directives into effect and left behind other nonviolent but less connected prisoners behind bars.
In the case of Forrester, a prisoner of state, he implemented a license or transitional release, but his application was denied.
Other seniors in coronavirus-infested prisons: Paul Manafort coronavirus return ticket Many other elderly, in poor health and nonviolent prisoners remain in prison
There are many like Forrester in the Florida judicial system.
A 2019 State Corrections Department report showed that nearly 14,000 criminals, 14% of the criminal population, are serving sentences for drug-related crimes.The report does not distinguish between violent and nonviolent criminals, nor do inmates serve sentences.opioid-related crimes of those who traffic cocaine or heroin.
But a government report found that prosecutions for opioid-related crimes led to a dramatic increase in the criminal population from 2006 to 2011.In fiscal 2010-11, 1,200 inmates were serving sentences for opioid-related crimes; 81% had never committed drug-related crimes and 65% needed drug treatment, according to the Florida Government’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Accountability report.
In the federal system, mandatory minimum sentences have declined particularly since the 1990s, continuing to result in long sentences for thousands of federal prisoners. According to the US Sentencing Commission, the US sentencing commission has not been able to do so.Nearly 20,000 federal agencies in 2019 referred to mandatory minimum sentences.of these, more than 70%, related to drug trafficking offences.
Forrester tested positive for COVID-19 on July 13. He’s getting better now and he assumes it’s negative, he hasn’t been tested again.
However, in neighborhoods near a prison, he fears that the virus will become inevitable again.The reinfection option, the experts said, is real.Forrester has heard of other prisoners who died of COVID-19 and wonders: How many times can I get it?the virus and survive?
So far, 340 prisoners at the Bay Correctional and Rehabilitation Center in Panama City, Florida, where Forrester is imprisoned, have positive results.
Of the more than 95,000 criminals in Florida, 15,500, or about 16%, have COVID-19, an infection rate that exceeds that of the federal criminal system.
The Florida Department of Corrections said it suspended visits, limited transfers between establishments, and changed meal schedules to allow social estjournment in canteens to stop the spread of the virus.case, said the branch.
GEO Group, a personal company that manages the Bay Correctional and Rehabilitation Center and some other prisons in Florida, said it began mass testing of COVID-19, distributed masks to inmates, and asked to quarantine if they had contact with other employees.With coronavirus.
Isolated and frightened: the plight of other young people trapped by the coronavirus pandemic
Forrester convicted in 2009 of trafficking 14 grams or more of oxycodone and obtaining drugs through fraud.Although there is no evidence that Forrester promotes drugs, the weight of the pills triggered a drug trafficking rate, punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years.
Under Florida law, if Forrester had sold two hundred grams of cocaine or methamphetamine, he would have been sentenced to just seven years, the result of legislation passed to crack down on drug dealers who have since caught drug addicts.
OPIOIDS
“The quitting drug dealer the legislature had in mind is a ‘thug’ who runs and shoots other people in the neighborhood,” said Janet Ferris, a retired Florida judge.”The truth in the maximum communities is that this is not the case.”
Recognizing that sentencing legislation had gone too far, the Florida Legislature raised the weighting thresholds that would cause mandatory sentences in 2014.Advocates announced substitution as a “common sense” law that would increase the number of nonviolent offenders sent to criminals for long sentences.
But the law is not retroactive and the costs of doing so retroactive have failed so far.If Forrester had been convicted after the passage of the law, he would have been sentenced to seven years.
”It’s getting scarier’: while the coronavirus in prisons, the families of older prisoners wait in fear
Severe sentencing legislation is not unique to Florida, the state has increasingly become an aberrant case for having strict mandatory minimum sentences, Nancy Daniels of the Florida Association of Public Defenders said.
The judges, faced with defendants like Forrester, still have no selection to impose long sentences that are not fair.The opinion on who convicted Forrester at 15 years of age identified him.
“We have the addicts and we manage the crime, all treated in the same way as the drafting of the legislature,” Judge Roger McDonald said at Forrester’s sentencing hearing in December 2009, according to court transcripts.”But since the Legislature is the Legislature and the Court is the Court, we will have to enforce the laws, and we will comply with them, and we cannot make exceptions that do not exist.”
Ferris said he felt powerless in front of the defendants in his courtroom, many of whom were number one young offenders.
“In many cases I have not had the opportunity to do what I thought was in the interest of justice.And it’s a worrying feeling of Array,” he said. When other people walk into the courtroom and say, “Judge, I ask for justice” and you know what they say is right kindArray …To tell someone, “I’m sorry I can’t do justice in this case because the legislature has enacted a law on mandatory sentences, I’ll have to stick to that.”””
In 2002, while visiting his grandmother in Bradenton, Florida, Forrester won some news that invited him to reflect.He had cancerous tumors in his left lung and would die, remember that his doctor had told him on the phone.
Several surgeries to remove his lung appeared to have extended his life, but the following years he moved inside and outside the hospital.Several visits were caused by pneumonia. This adds to a litany of other fitness problems: chronic headaches, chest and back pain, sleep apnea, strokes and panic attacks.He has undergone further surgeries for chronic spinal problems.
Meanwhile, he says, he prescribed massive doses of painkillers.
He had spent much of his years working in telecommunications, first as a repairman in Florida, then as a pipeline controller in Oklahoma, and then back in Florida as a dispatcher.When his addiction worsened, he said he had disability benefits to make ends meet. month. get together.
As his fitness disorders worsened, so did his addiction. I was in doctor’s offices and pain clinics, receiving prescriptions for dozens or even stacks of milligrams of various opioid medications, adding MS Contin, methadone pills, oxycodone, morphine, hydromorphine, muscle relaxants. and to Marinol for his loss of appetite.
“I was given hundreds of hydrocodones,” he said, referring to the rechargeable prescriptions of a hundred pills.”I temporarily learned that, of all the other life-threatening disorders I had been through, I am now in the midst of the deadly maximum, very addictive addiction and opioid.”
A pain management doctor testified at Forrester’s sentencing hearing that some of the doses prescribed through Forrester were too high.The dose of morphine Forrester had won from the doctor “was a little high,” Dr. Gwinn Murray said, according to court transcripts.
The last time Murray saw Forrester, Forrester asked for an increase in his oxycodone prescription because his pain had not gone away.Murray, who believed that patients rely less on medication and more on other means of dealing with their pain, rejected the request, according to transcripts.
After his medications were reduced, Forrester said he began tampering with prescriptions. The less drugs he downloaded, the more he felt he needed them and the more illegal means he used to download them. The more medication he took, the worse his life became.
Forrester woke up twice with respiratory assistance after an accidental overdose; other times, he said he woke up on his couch while doctors gave him a dose of Narcan to oppose the effect of the medications he had taken.
“My total personality has changed,” he said. I didn’t know myself anymore, and all that mattered to fuel this addiction that controlled me.”
Law enforcement officials, as well as prosecutors and bailiffs, have opposed adjustments to mandatory minimum sentences, fearing that the rest of the sentences will only lead to higher crime rates and the spread of drugs in communities.
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said mandatory minimum sentences make the consequences consistent and cases where sentences for the same crimes range from sentencing to sentencing or county-to-county.
“Mandatory minimums are designed to have the right consequences for others who sell and traffick drugs,” said Gualtieri, outgoing president of the Florida Marshals Association.
However, Gualtieri said drug law “was never intentional and did not include other people who were addicts and drug users.”
”Full chaos’: as the coronavirus pandemic is causing the judicial system
In Broward County, prosecutors have begun to ease the sentences of several defendants convicted of opioid trafficking.Citing adjustments made through the legislature in 2014, prosecutors relief criminal convictions for two dozen defendants.Nineteen other people have been released and four are expected.will be released in the next 4 years, Broward’s deputy attorney general Jeff Marcus said.Another defendant died before his release documents were processed.
“We were a matter of basic fairness to begin a review of those cases and reduce sentences if necessary,” Marcus said in a statement.
A challenge in Florida is the lack of a coherent vision of what the criminal justice formula looks like, said Senator Jeff Brandes, a Republican from St. Petersburg.
“The real question is whether you’re going to use knowledge and studies to make decisions, or whether you’re going to be convinced that the legislature beyond has done the right thing,” said Brandes, who leads efforts to replace sentences..asked for more discretion for the judges.” Fundamentally, do we deserve to treat addiction as a problem of fitness or criminal justice?”
Long criminal sentences for those offenders do more harm than good, a confidence Brandes said Republicans and Democrats share.
“Criminal justice reform is a bipartisan issue,” he said.”Democrats come to social justice. Republicans come to public protection and fiscal conservatism.”
Obviously, Forrester remembers the day he was convicted by a jury; thought he was about to cry when officials escorted him out of the courtroom, but the tears did not sprout.cell phone, they did.
“I felt that my center had been completely destroyed,” he says.”I prayed to Jesus to please me in what I want to know, what to do next.”
Years later, McDonald, who ruled who convicted Forrester, asked the state’s Clemency Executive Board to release him prematurely.
“At the time of the conviction and even today, I think the sentence was exaggerated given the crime, his history of criminals and the involvement of drug addiction in his life,” McDonald wrote in a 2018 letter to the council.
Without sentencing laws, McDonald said he would have imposed a much more lenient sentence: 3 years in prison, two years of probation and drug treatment.
The Florida Criminal Review Commission declined to comment on Forrester’s request for pardon, saying the data is confidential.The commission publishes a database of others who have benefited from indulgence; Forrester’s call is not in the database.
For Forrester, no one listens.
“If you listen, ” he said, “then they don’t care.”
Forrester says he spends his days reading the Bible, playing gambling he bought for his prison-provided tablet and exchanging emails with an old friend with whom he will live after his release.In the morning, meditate and pray. Over the years, he has collected a dozen certificates, adding several of the dog education systems that allowed prisoners to become trained master teachers and a few more after completing an addiction remedy program.
His symptoms have subsided, but the worry of dying before he sees the outside of a criminal wall is not.
He doesn’t see the time to move from home to Orlando, to his pets who are still alive and a friend who “stayed with me all those years.”
“I dream of the day I walk to my door,” he says, “and I walk inside where I sit again.”
Follow Kristine Phillips, USA TODAY’s Justice and Legal Affairs Reporter, on Twitter @bykristinep.
”It would paralyze us’: coronavirus wreaks havoc on rural police services