By Steve Bogira
The long federal sentences for drug crimes, Rostenkowski told the crowd, are especially ill conceived. He described an inmate he’d met, a 20-year-old man with a 17-year sentence for having acted as a drug courier. The man deserved punishment, Rostenkowski said, but locking him up “from the end of adolescence to the beginning of middle age” seemed “excessive.” He pointed out that there was no evidence of progress in the war on drugs, despite all the young people being sentenced to decades in prison for drug crimes.
But U.S. District Court judge Robert Gettleman, who’d presided over the Flournoy case, made it clear to prosecutors that he didn’t think life terms were appropriate for most of the defendants, including Andre. “I cannot equate this man with Ted Kaczynski,” Gettleman said of Andre at a January 1998 hearing, shortly after the Unabomber had been given a life term. “If there is a way consistent with the law, I would prefer not to send this man to jail for life.” The U.S. attorney’s office subsequently backed off its request for life terms for Andre and several of the others. Federal sentencing guidelines, however, still mandated a term of 40 years for Andre–and there was nothing that Judge Gettleman, the prosecutors, or Andre’s court-appointed lawyer could do about that.
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It was now Judge Gettleman’s turn. He called the case “a sad story all around.” If he had the discretion, he said, he’d give Andre a shorter sentence than he was going to have to impose. “You seem like a decent man,” the judge said. “You’ve made some terrible mistakes that you are going to be paying for.”
And in October 1997 he sentenced businessman William Stoecker to prison for bilking Illinois banks out of more than $150 million–the biggest fraud in Illinois history. He got seven and a half years.
“It was a rough sentence, but it’s better than life,” Andre said two weeks after Gettleman gave him his term. Then he paused, reconsidering. “When I get up outta here I’m gonna be 60 years old! I’ll be an old man. My kids’ll be grown. I still say the crime don’t fit the time. They bring us in here and give us all this time like we done murdered somebody.”
