Sheila Devereux, convicted of drug trafficking in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was sentenced to life in prison under the state’s three strikes law in 2005. She’d refused to accept a plea deal to serve seven years “because I was not going to plead guilty to something I did not do.” She said she had no knowledge of the six-plus grams of cocaine that police said they found in her boyfriend’s home, where she’d been staying temporarily while apartment hunting. She was, she said, completely clean of drugs when the Tulsa cops swept through the house. Back then, she said, she still “had faith in the justice system.” Her boyfriend ended up taking a deal to serve thirteen years for possessing approximately six hundred dollars’ worth of drugs.31
Amazingly, Devereux, who was forty-two at the time of her arrest, remained incarcerated even after federal indictments alleged that two of the cops who raided the home, Officer Nick DeBruin and retired officer Harold R. Wells, belonged to a ring of eight Tulsa cops who stole drugs and money, planted drugs, falsified search warrants, tampered with witnesses, and violated civil rights. Tulsa deputy police chief Mark McCrory testified in federal court that at least one of those eight officers was also implicated in a multistate burglary ring that might be linked to several homicides. More than twenty cases were overturned as a result of the alleged ring of dirty cops. Devereux finally gained her freedom in 2011 when a court placed her on probation.32
It’s worth noting the specifics in the two previous convictions that prosecutors used to secure Devereux’s life sentence. In November 1998 she had overdosed on cocaine. After recovering in the hospital, she was taken straight to jail and charged with felony possession. Several years later her truck broke down, and as she waited for help on the side of the road, police pulled up, found a marijuana cigarette in her car, and charged her with her second felony. She’d been sentenced to probation in both cases.
The ex-legislator who had originally introduced the three-strikes life-without-parole bill said later that he was offended by Devereux’s life sentence. He claimed the bill was intended as a way to crack down on violent habitual offenders.33 This intention, however, was apparently not conveyed in the language of the law. Too many legislators never learn that questions of crime and punishment are too complex to be answered by simplistic formulas that simply cannot fit every circumstance. Others learn the lesson too late, after they’ve inflicted more damage than they can ever repair. Whatever the intent of the legislation that ensnared Devereux, prosecutors were quick to take advantage of its broad language to obtain over-the-top sentences.
On Sept. 30, 2010, when the appellate court denied her appeal, it stated, “We find that [her] sentence does not shock the Court’s conscience.”34 The criminal justice system doesn’t outrage easily. The statute that put Devereux away for life remains on the books.
In 1994 a California judge handed J. K. “Skip” Singh twenty-five years to life for a single rock of methamphetamine that fell out of his boot when he was booked at the jail in Bakersfield.35 The arresting officer said he pulled Singh over because the light on his license plate was illegally tinted and then arrested him for driving under the influence (DUI) of a drug that turned out to be heroin. But it was the rock that would put him away for good.
No choir boy, Singh was a cast-off child who’d grown up in foster homes. At the time of his arrest in 1994 he was a heroin addict who’d already served sentences for robbery and attempted robbery. He’d also once failed to appear in court. His DUI arrest was on March 4, three days after the state’s three-strikes law went into effect.
Heroin and meth habits are mutually exclusive; mixing the two substances in the bloodstream can easily result in death. Singh said that somebody had given him the rock of crystal meth weighing 0.22 gram, or less than 10 percent of a sugar packet, and that he “was planning to give it away.” It was worth about twenty dollars on the street.
Singh, a cancer survivor, was in his mid-fifties when we talked in 2011. He pledged to walk a straight line should he ever make it out of prison. This type of talk is not surprising. But when I checked I learned that he actually had a job waiting for him at his brother-in-law’s welding business in Missouri. By the time we spoke, he’d already served seventeen years for that twenty-dollar rock. His wife, Linda, still hopeful, visited him regularly. Even hard-core criminals, when they reach middle age, are much less likely to commit crimes, and Singh was unusually forthcoming about his previous offenses, which lent him some degree of credibility. According to younger convicts who served with him, he tenaciously lectured them to straighten out while there was still time. He’d become a father figure to a youthful prison population that was mostly fatherless.
Whatever he was planning to do with that rock those many years ago, the question now was, was it just to put him away for life for that sliver of dope? It’s safe to say that no other Western democracy would inflict such a major penalty for a minor incident that involved no victim. But the intractable war on drugs provides a handy tool to put people like Singh away for good when the system tires of them. Twenty-five-to-life inmates rarely make it out of the California prison system. His first parole hearing was set for 2019. Had he beaten the odds and made it out then, he’d have served six years more than Hugo’s Jean Valjean.
Singh did not make it to that hearing. Linda called in early 2012 to tell me he died in custody on the last day of 2011. “He developed an aortic dissection,” she explained, a very dangerous condition in which there’s bleeding into and along the wall of the major artery carrying blood out of the heart. The condition can be repaired with surgery, but Singh was prescribed medication instead. When his medication ran out, he told Linda, he was unable to renew his prescription. “He said he pleaded with the nurse,” Linda told me, “but she just said, ‘Next.’” Linda made many useless phone calls. People hung up on her, she waited and waited on hold, she was disconnected in transfer, she was sent on round-robins that took her back to the same extension—all the usual telephonic flip-offs that are geometrically expanded when penal authorities are involved.
Finally, after he suffered a series of small strokes, Singh was taken by ambulance from prison in Corcoran to the public hospital in Fresno. “When prisoners come into that hospital their families get one hour with them, one time. That’s the rule,” Linda said. “I drove up there and sat with him for the hour.” He died before doctors could operate. The system didn’t exactly kill him, but it didn’t move mountains to save him either. It was a death rendered even more anxious and cheerless by his convict status.
Sergio Ayala was stopped in Pasadena for driving over a painted divider, the arresting officer said in his report.36 That, recalls Mike Rothmiller, was one of the excuses an instructor at the Police Academy recommended to cadets who might need to fabricate probable cause after they hit the street. “Don’t say it was an equipment violation because then you would need physical evidence, such as a broken tail light,” the instructor explained. Instead, tell lies that can’t be proved. Arresting officers doctor most of their reports in one way or another, Rothmiller maintains. Cops “weave a spell” over them “to make them fit their perceptions.”
“Do you know why I stopped you?” the officer asked Ayala. No, he said. According to Ayala, the officer replied, “Well, when I see a black and a Hispanic together I know they’re up to no good.”