It Takes a
Tough Law to Hold Her
By: Matthew Purdy
The New York times, May 8, 2002
Bedford Hills, N.Y. - Martha Weatherspoon makes her
way across the waiting room at the women's prison. "Don't try to get
away, now," a correction officer says.
It's a jailhouse joke. Ms. Weatherspoon is 73 and is
going nowhere slowly. She walks with a cane, has a long scar where they
opened her up to replace her right knee, and wears loose sandals to
accommodate a persistent corn on her little toe. And she is not due to
leave prison until just before her 80th birthday.
Ms. Weatherspoon is serving 20 years to life for drug
sale and possession. Her age and condition mean nothing under
toughest-in-the-nation drug laws that Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller signed 29
years ago today, calling them "the strongest possible tools to
protect our law-abiding citizens from drug pushers."
The laws arose from frustration in Albany over the
intractable heroin epidemic. They require longer sentences for sale of two
ounces or possession of four ounces of narcotics than the minimum
sentences for rape and manslaughter. Judges have no discretion, there's
little use in appealing, and grants of clemency are rare.
All the cards are in the hands of prosecutors, who
are the laws' strongest defenders, warning nervous lawmakers against
appearing soft on crime.
Today's anniversary will bring calls for change from
a widening array of advocates, now including the laws' original sponsor,
clergymen, judges and elected officials, not to mention an organization of
inmate relatives called Mothers of the Disappeared. Gov. George E. Pataki
declared in his State of the State address: "Let's reform the
outdated Rockefeller drug laws." But in Albany, good ideas have only
a casual relationship with legislative action.
Politically, it is easier to let Martha Weatherspoon
sit behind razor wire at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Not that
it's a bad place. It's a Smith College of prisons, and Ms. Weatherspoon,
who entered at the age of 60 with a third-grade education, has taken
advantage of it.
She learned pottery and went to school, stopping only
when her aging, injured back made it painful to sit in class. "I've
learned a lot of things," she said. "I never knew fractions or
division."
She has already served 13 years, more than some
violent criminals. And now she has become a testament to the simplistic
reasoning behind the Rockefeller laws.
Ms. Weatherspoon grew up farming in Alabama and came
north, first cleaning houses in the New York City suburbs and then picking
vegetables and fruit on the farms around Syracuse. She fell from a ladder
while picking apples in the early 1980's, cracking her ribs and leaving
her disabled and destitute. Drugs hooked two of her four daughters.
"It broke my heart," she said. But then, Ms. Weatherspoon
started dealing drugs to make money. "I bought furniture for my
apartment, clothes and lots of food," she said. "Then I
stopped."
Then she started again, procuring eight ounces of
cocaine for a man who turned out to be an undercover officer. "She
made some bad choices, beginning with selling drugs," said Richard
Southwick, a federal prosecutor, who prosecuted Ms. Weatherspoon when he
was an assistant district attorney. Ms. Weatherspoon rejected a plea deal
and a reduced sentence, choosing to fight instead. She ended up with 20
years, which feels like a life sentence.
"It is illegal and there is punishment,"
said Shirley Witherspoon, Ms. Weatherspoon's daughter, who spells her last
name differently. "But this harsh a punishment for a woman of her
age?"
Ms. Weatherspoon's daughter does not argue that all
prison time is bad. She credits her own six-month prison term in 1994 with
breaking her drug addiction.
But even Ms. Weatherspoon's prosecutor cannot argue that her lengthy term
makes sense. "One has to ask oneself," he said, "what's
being served by her continued incarceration?"
Apparently not drug control at the subsidized
apartment complex where Ms. Weatherspoon lived and sold drugs. "Drugs
were all over the place," said Shirley Witherspoon.
Ask law enforcement officials now about the complex
on Syracuse's east side and you'll hear the same frustration that
motivated Albany lawmakers a generation ago. Drugs have survived the
efforts of the police and apartment managers. Even a name change worthy of
politicians — from Hilltop apartments to Rolling Green Estates —
hasn't helped. "They can put Happy Acres on it," said Ed McQuat,
the chief of narcotics for the Onondaga County district attorney's office.
"It is what it is."
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