Teen Gets 26Yrs for selling 350$ of weed

[nifer]

TEENAGER BUSTED FOR MARIJUANA GETS 26-YEAR SENTENCE

by Carla Crowder, News staff writer,

Alabama

MOULTON - Webster Alexander lives in a brown trailer on the outskirts of this Lawrence County town. The trailer, alongside a gravel road across from a seemingly boundless cow pasture, is home to Alexander's young cousins, a niece and nephew, his sister, his parents, a dachshund and a cage of fluttering cockatiels.

It is also where, last winter and early spring, Alexander sold marijuana, an ounce at a time, to someone he thought was a new kid at school.

Alexander was 18, a senior at Lawrence County High with two classes left before graduation. The "new kid" turned out to be an undercover drug agent. And four sales, together worth about $350, landed Alexander a 26-year prison sentence.

It was his first arrest.

Authorities have used the prosecution to sound a warning through the halls of this rural school, where battling drugs and alcohol has become a priority.

"Certainly it makes a point, a very big point, about accountability," said Lawrence County District Attorney Ed Osborn. His office handled the plea bargain in January that sealed the stiff sentence.

It's probably tougher than anything handed down in the Birmingham metro area, according to police and school officials. "In Smalltown, USA, they're going to throw the book at them," said Birmingham Vice and Narcotics Sgt. Richard Miller.

Prison terms of 10 years or more in drug cases are usually reserved for repeat offenders, or crimes in which guns are used, said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the NORML Foundation, a Washington-based group working to bring marijuana laws in line with alcohol and tobacco laws.

"Putting a young man in jail for 26 years, on the face of it, appears to be over-punitive, too expensive to the taxpayer and of no deterrent value," he said.

Once news of Alexander's sentence hit the Internet, NORML came to his aid. The group will lobby for a reduced sentence or probation.

Alexander was not arrested with marijuana at school. Prosecutors secured enhancements on his sentence because of a state law that adds five years when someone sells drugs within three miles of a school or housing project.

Though on an isolated country stretch, the Alexanders' property met both standards.

Many states have "drug-free schools" laws that up the penalties for drug sales near schools and churches. Usually the boundary falls within 1,000 feet. St. Pierre said he knew of no other state that extended the area three miles.

Marijuana has been so easily available in this blue-collar town of 3,300 that Alexander smoked his first joint at age 9. It was six years before he starting smoking regularly.

He doesn't deny he sold marijuana. It was easy money. But authorities' depiction of him as some sort of kingpin is far from the truth, he said. "I've been in maybe one fight in school my whole life, and now I'm sentenced to 26 years in the pen," he said. "That doesn't make any sense to me."

After his arrest and expulsion, Alexander found a private school where he completed his classes and got a high school diploma. He also graduated from a drug treatment program, found a job as a bricklayer and enrolled in Calhoun Community College.

He's hoping for mercy, that those accomplishments will impress the judge at a March 10 hearing where he will seek probation.

Alexander played football during most of his school years and summer league baseball. He was a C student. "Everybody knew me. Everybody liked me," Alexander said. "I loved going to school."

Undercover in school:

The crackdown that led to Alexander's arrest began soon after Ricky Nichols took over as principal in fall 2001.

Nichols, an Army Reservist who target-shoots with sheriff's deputies, considers himself a front-line soldier in the war on drugs. His training includes police courses on drug identification. The drug task force has given him pointers on searching students' cars for contraband.

Once a girl came in the school office asking for aspirin. She admitted having a hangover and failed a breath test. Nichols searched her car. "She didn't really have a choice," he said. "I don't have to have probable cause. The police have to have probable cause."

Nichols says there were 26 drug and alcohol incidents last year, the year Alexander was busted, at the school of 600 students. The students were either suspended or sent to an alternative school 20 miles away. Some dropped out and earned GEDs. Some just dropped out, he said.

Nichols believes every school has drug problems and conditions in Lawrence County were not unique. What was unusual was that the former sheriff offered to assign an undercover cop to the classroom.

"I would love it," Nichols recalled telling him.

So last February, a 26-year-old agent with the Lawrence County Drug Task Force enrolled as a 19-year-old senior transfer.

The agent, who agreed to talk about his work as long as he not be identified, said Nichols showed him photos of students suspected of being involved in drugs. He was assigned to senior English and government, both of Alexander's classes.

Courtney Bush, another targeted student, was in one of the classes.

The agent said he hit the jackpot Day One. He was sitting behind Bush, and Bush's girlfriend announced her intentions to break up with him because he was a drug dealer, the agent said. "I tapped him on the left shoulder and said, 'Hey, can you hook me up?'"

On Day Two, he made a deal with Alexander.

During the break between classes, Alexander was sitting at a table with some friends. The agent wandered over. He introduced himself as a new student and began asking questions about where to "party."

Alexander told him that he was "the one to see about the smoke."

From Feb. 29 to April 3, the agent made three buys from Alexander and two from Bush, according to court records.

The agent did some homework, took one test and made a good grade. That worried the principal. He was supposed to be a troublemaker.

Suspicions that he was a cop began to brew toward the end of his eight weeks there. To allay them, the agent and principal staged a scene outside a classroom where the agent got in trouble for being tardy.

"I reamed him out. I tore him up. I ate him alive," Nichols said. "He said a few choice words about me and bingo, he's back in the pack."

Authorities say they do not believe Bush and Alexander were working together. Bush, now 20, whose case is pending, likely will face a steep sentence as well. Unlike Alexander, he carried marijuana to school, the agent said.

Alexander's 1976 Ford pickup was unreliable, so the agent gave him rides home to make the buys. Alexander usually lit up a joint. The agent had to fake it. "I would simulate, blow out instead of inhaling. It made a lot of smoke and it looked real good," he said.

On April 9, during the agent's fourth buy from Alexander, deputies swarmed the brown trailer.

Alexander's 22-year-old sister was cooking breakfast for her children, then 1 and 4.

Deputies searched the home. Alexander was jailed overnight. He was charged with four counts of distribution of marijuana, one count of first-degree possession and one count of possession of drug paraphernalia rolling papers, scales and a pipe. An uncle bailed him out.

Also arrested was Alexander's cousin, Rodney Hicks, who lives nearby. Hicks delivered marijuana to Alexander from an oak tree between their houses, the agent said. He was charged with one count each of marijuana distribution, possession and possession of paraphernalia. Later that day, police arrested Bush in the school lunchroom. Of the three, Hicks, 19, was the lone one to receive youthful offender status from Circuit Judge Philip Reich.

Court-appointed attorney Chris Malcom of Moulton represents Bush, who qualified for indigent defense.

"I don't think he had a serious drug problem, and there wasn't a ton of money involved," Malcom said. "It kind of gave him a little bit of identity, a chance to ride around with the cool kids."

Malcom said he was not surprised that Reich denied youthful offender status for Bush and Alexander. It's consistent with the judge's history. The seriousness of these cases lies in the multiple sales. Nine times out of ten, a young person will get youthful offender status under which authorities can keep them no longer than three years for a first-time possession case, Malcom said.

Metro practices:

There are such wide disparities in drug sentences that it's difficult to know whether the 26-year sentence is in line with what judges in other counties and states are doing.

There were 58 cases of drug use and possession in Birmingham schools last year. But police never assigned a **** to any classrooms. "We don't put undercover people in school. I don't really think it's necessary," said Lt. Robert Boswell, who supervises the uniformed school resource officers in Birmingham schools.

A 2000 survey of Mountain Brook students found that 42 percent of seniors said they used drugs other than alcohol. Car searches have turned up marijuana and the prescription drug Lortab. But school officials rarely, if ever, got police involved.

"In my experience there is not normally the quantity that would warrant police taking action," said David Stiles, director of organizational development at Mountain Brook Schools and formerly the high school principal.

One researcher who studies these issues called the Lawrence County sentence "a little on the shocking side."

"This kid is paying the price that very few other people involved in using and selling a relatively small quantity of marijuana normally face because of the decisions, somewhat arbitrary, of the adults involved," said Malcolm Young, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that develops alternatives to incarceration.

As a father of teenagers, Young said he recognizes the serious challenge that drugs pose for schools. Yet, affluent kids in his D.C. suburb always wind up in treatment, not court. "Kids that were dealing much more than that kid never see the inside of a jailhouse," Young said.

Family connection:

Alexander has opted to pay a private lawyer. Most of his paychecks $3,000, he estimates have gone to legal fees. His parents help out.

Alexander's mother, Wanda, travels with a job training supermarket employees. His father, Arnold Alexander, works construction as a carpenter and welder.

Arnold Alexander, 46, was layered with jackets and coveralls for work outside on a recent day so cold and icy that school was closed. He took a break for an interview and rushed because he needed to be back on the job.

He has fought his own battles with the law in Lawrence County. "I've been busted for marijuana twice, and I've never got nothing like this," Arnold Alexander said.

His cases have been for possession, most recently a 1999 case in which he got caught growing two plants, he said. Both times, he received probation.

"I've lived here in Lawrence County all my life, and I've smoked pot ever since I was in high school," he said.

As he sees it, sending his son to prison will not curb drug use. "It's as widespread as it ever was."

Neither father nor son believes that Webster Alexander was targeted because of his father's past.

"My daddy's a good man. He took care of us our whole life," Webster Alexander said. "I'm not here to blame anybody."

[sassa]

damn...poor kid....

[normalnoises]

That is awful.

[kramadas]

26 years! Thats ridiculous!

[normalnoises]

Really. And child rapists get less than that.