A Knock at Midnight(40)
“If none of the other charges stuck, how could conspiracy?” I asked him. “I’ve been reading up on it, and it seems like the broadest law in the world.”
Professor Udashen nodded. “Your understanding is correct. No drugs, no money—no physical evidence is required. Drug conspiracies are popular with federal prosecutors—it’s their greatest tool. Many conspiracy charges are based on the word of cooperating witnesses, who usually get lesser sentences in exchange for their testimony. The law is supposed to be used to catch the kingpins but usually ends up affecting people much lower on the totem pole.”
“That’s exactly what happened in Sharanda’s case.”
“It happens all the time,” Professor Udashen said, with a tired smile. “I’m representing a young lady now who was indicted with twenty-three other people here in the Northern District. Her boyfriend sent her to Western Union a couple of times to pick up money someone was sending him for drugs he had fronted. She did it, didn’t think anything of it. She just knew she was picking up money, didn’t know the type or even the quantity of drugs fronted. Now she’s charged with one count of drug conspiracy. The government is offering to dismiss her charges if she turns on the boyfriend.”
“It’s that easy?” I asked. “That’s all it took was her picking up money? Even though she had nothing else to do with it?”
“That’s it. It’s why so many people convicted of drug charges plead guilty. It doesn’t matter how minor their role is. As long as a defendant is somehow linked to a conspiracy, they can be held accountable for the greatest crimes of that conspiracy.”
I thanked Professor Udashen for his time and walked briskly down the hall. I felt slightly sick. And it wasn’t only about Sharanda. I was thinking about myself.
More specifically, I was thinking about how in my senior year of high school, I used to drive Red to the little clapboard house in East Dallas on the way to pick up Sissy. How I knew Red sold drugs. How I knew exactly what was in the plastic-wrapped package that he hid under my passenger seat. How we used to drive down Interstate 30—“Dirty 30,” they used to call it, on account of the state troopers that lay in wait to jam up drug traffickers. I don’t have nothing to do with it, I would have said if anyone asked. That was Red’s business, not mine. But according to what my professor had just explained to me, driving Red to Dallas made me just as guilty of violating federal drug conspiracy laws as Sharanda Jones.
That night, I lay in bed, shaken. I imagined the headlines: PROMISING LAW STUDENT RECEIVES LIFE SENTENCE. BOGATA GIRL GONE BAD. I pictured the look on my dad’s face as he was forced to sit through a trial at which guys I didn’t even know testified that I supplied them all with drugs. I imagined my mom and Jazz and me eating Cheetos off napkins again in the visiting room—only this time it would be federal prison, not state, and they’d be visiting me. I thought about the extraordinary grace with which Sharanda met every inhuman challenge of her incarceration. I wondered if I had even an ounce of that kind of strength. By morning, I had been through every nightmare scenario in my head and talked myself out of most of them. But my new understanding of conspiracy made one thing very clear: I would fight for Sharanda’s life as if it were my own, because it was.
* * *
—
I GREW OBSESSED with Sharanda’s case, breathing it, eating it, sleeping it. In between campus interviews for summer internships and class, I would pull out a section of transcripts from my bag and continue my note taking. I continued to look up relevant case law as I went, along with scholarly articles that I thought might help me. It was time-consuming, but I was in too deep to turn back now.
The sentencing disparities in Sharanda’s case might have been the hardest thing to swallow. Julie and Baby Jack ended up serving less than eight years each after providing testimony against Sharanda; they had already been released before I even started law school. Sharanda’s entire family was sentenced for longer than that. The judge handed Mitchell five years, Weasel eight, Cooter eighteen and, unbelievably, Sharanda’s quadriplegic mother, Genice, received a seventeen-year sentence in federal prison. The most insane sentencing disparity was with Spider, who testified that he supplied Sharanda with cocaine and admitted to selling more than 150 kilos of powder cocaine to various individuals in two states over the course of several years. Obviously, as the supplier—not only to Julie and Baby Jack through Sharanda but also to others—Spider trafficked significantly more drugs than anyone else in the case. And yet for his damning testimony against Sharanda, his sentence was reduced to nineteen and a half years, while the woman who acted as a go-between, carrying kilos for him to Baby Jack and Julie, was sentenced to life.
The disparity took my breath away. The feds had reduced the sentence of a big fish—a supplier—so they could take the entire natural life of someone who was barely even swimming. The injustice seemed so blatant I kept flipping back and rereading sections of the transcripts, my chest tight, to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. It hurt to read.
I needed to understand how the judge had come up with Sharanda’s sentence. From my time interning for federal judges and observing sentencing hearings, I knew federal sentencing guidelines were used when calculating sentences in federal cases. Two categories, offense conduct and criminal history of the defendant, are put into a formula and adjusted based on sentencing enhancements.