ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701130085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ALLENWOOD, PA.
SERIES: Crime and Punishment
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
Everette Law, a soft-spoken 30-year-old, remembers the day police showed up to arrest him on federal charges of running a crack ring in Roanoke. He was heading into the hotel room where he had been staying, when "about 50" police surrounded him with guns drawn.
"Like I killed the president or something," he recalls. "They were putting guns up to my ear."
As he soon would learn, his crack-dealing friends and underlings had cooperated with federal drug agents and had named him as the leader of their organization.
Law doesn't deny that he was selling crack. But he could not believe the price he would have to pay for it - the same sentence he likely would have received if he had killed the president: life.
Law, who was sentenced in 1994, is one of two drug defendants in Roanoke in the past few years to get life. Known by his nickname, "Pooka," he got caught during a major federal investigation in 1993 called "Operation Roundball."
Law had no history of violence and, unlike many crack dealers, he didn't carry a gun. His criminal record includes a previous crack-selling charge, a grand larceny and petty larcenies. Those qualified him for career criminal status in federal court.
He says he made $8,000 or $9,000 a month supplying crack to smaller dealers in Roanoke, although he disputes that he was a leader of the group. He could buy half a kilogram of powder cocaine - about 18 ounces - for $10,000, cook it into crack and make $15,000 or $16,000.
In 1988, Law was convicted in Roanoke County of selling crack and went to prison for more than two years. He was on probation when he was indicted on the federal charges in 1993.
He said he tried legitimate jobs when he got out but couldn't support himself on minimum wage. He has four children with three women and said child support took most of his paycheck.
"It just didn't pay," he said. "I saw other people out there" selling drugs.
It was too tempting. Six months after he got out of prison, he said, he began dealing again.
He didn't really think about the results of his selling, what the crack he put on the street did to the addicts.
"I felt kind of bad," he said. But "I didn't mess with people who smoked, I messed with the guys who were selling."
Law and his attorney remember the case differently. Law signed a plea agreement that he thought called for eight to 12 years in prison. His attorney, Marc Small, said he never told Law that. Law never read the agreement.
If he had, he would have seen that the U.S. Attorney's Office made it clear no negotiations had taken place between the prosecutor and Law's defense attorney, which is unusual. And it specifically says that even if Law were willing to cooperate with the government, the shortest sentence the prosecutor would ask the judge for was 20 years.
In the agreement, Law pleaded guilty to the entire indictment - no charges were dismissed, no ceiling was placed on the amount of crack his sentence would be based on, no credit was given for accepting responsibility by pleading. Those are common concessions made by the government when a defendant agrees to plead, saving prosecutors the time, expense and risk of losing that a trial entails.
Small said the government may have hammered Law to pressure him into helping agents catch his suppliers. Law didn't help. Several other defendants in Operation Roundball also had faced life but got their sentences reduced by cooperating.
Small said he couldn't comment in detail on Law's case because of attorney-client privilege, but he did say that Law gave him little to work with.
"My client instructed me not to negotiate [a plea bargain], then said he wanted to plead," Small said.
The best Law could hope for at that point was to minimize the involvement attributed to him in the court's pre-sentence report. Since drug weight is a major factor in determining the length of sentence, Small could have argued that Law was responsible for less than the nearly 2 kilograms of crack that the government and his co-defendants claimed.
Law was not caught with any drugs, so prosecutors would have had to establish the amount of crack involved through the testimony of informants and co-defendants who said they bought from him. Rules in federal court make it easier to convict a defendant on hearsay evidence.
But, Small said, Law told him not to fight the drug weight and not to appeal.
"I have no idea what was in his head," Small said.
"I think Everette Law got kicked in the butt. I think if Everette had been before a jury [in state court], he probably would have gotten 25 years."
Law said he would have taken his chances at trial if he had known a plea agreement meant a life sentence. "Nobody pleads to life."
He's trying to raise several thousand dollars to pay a lawyer to look for anything in his pre-sentence report that could be used to ask the court to reconsider his sentence. It's his only hope, and one to which he clings to keep from "going crazy."
Steve Baer, the federal prosecutor on Law's case, said Law received the sentence called for by sentencing guidelines.
"The guidelines are tough, but the people of this country want tough law enforcement," said Baer, who now is with the state attorney general's office. "He made choices."
Law now lives in a high-security federal prison in Allenwood, Pa., where he spends his time working in the kitchen and lifting weights. He calls family and friends in Roanoke frequently.
He said there are white inmates in Allenwood on crack charges, but they're the exception. "Here, I'd say at least 90 percent of the blacks have a crack charge," Law said.
Like a student going away to college and finding a familiar face there, Law ran into another Roanoke native in prison, and they decided to room together. His cellmate is Jesse Haskins, who got a 10-year sentence for selling crack in Roanoke two years ago.
Looking back at his friends on the street, Law said a few are still around working legitimate jobs. But, "they locked a lot of us up. A lot of us got killed over crack, drug-related things."
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN STAFF. Everette Law says he triedby CNBlegitimate jobs after his first prison term for dealing crack, but
minimum wage "just didn't pay." Now he's doing life without parole.
color.