<![CDATA[Mercy Me 924C - Blog]]>Thu, 06 Apr 2023 14:50:25 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Ian Owens Featured in detroit free press]]>Fri, 04 May 2018 15:36:38 GMThttp://www.mercyme924c.com/blog/ian-owens-featured-in-detroit-free-pressArticle Originally Posted in Detroit Free Press
Felon: I robbed banks. But I should get a second chance.
I used a gun to rob four banks and commit a carjacking in the Lansing area when I was in my early 20s, crimes that were prosecuted in federal court because they involved federally insured financial institutions. No one was hurt and no property was damaged.  I turned down a plea deal of seven years, but was convicted at trial of all charges.
I was sentenced to 10 years for my robberies and car jacking.  And because I used a gun in committing those crimes, I was sentenced to another 105 years in prison.
That’s decades longer than the average federal jail term for murder, narcotics trafficking or even child molestation. The judge who sentenced me said it was "without question, the longest sentence that I’ve ever imposed, other than one that said natural life."
I no doubt deserved punishment. But I shouldn’t have to die behind bars for my crimes.
Death in prison, though, is my fate unless the U.S. Congress passes the SAFE Justice Act of 2017. Introduced to the U.S. Senate in October 2017 by U.S. Rep. Robert Scott, D-Va., and a bipartisan group of 15 reform-minded lawmakers, the bill would reverse years of damage to thousands of men and women, like me, who were prosecuted for weapons charges under one of the harshest and most widely disparaged laws on the books — Section 924(c) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code.
 
Under that section, the use of a gun during a crime of violence or drug trafficking offense is separately punishable by a minimum of five years for a first conviction and a whopping 25 years for any "second or subsequent" violation. It also requires that those prison terms run consecutive to — that is, after — the punishment for any underlying crime.  
 
Section 924(c)’s "second or subsequent" language sounds like it’s intended for recidivists. Brandish a gun while selling drugs? Serve five extra years. Come out of prison and commit the same offense a second time? Serve 25 extra years. Do it a subsequent time? Twenty-five more years.  
Based on a labored interpretation of the phrase "second or successive," though, in 1993 the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that multiple convictions in the same proceeding — like my four bank robberies and carjacking, all of which were charged simultaneously — are subject to those enhanced penalty provisions.  
For me, it was the sentencing equivalent of a two-by-four to the head. It meant five years for the firearm used in my first robbery, 25 years each for the firearm used in my second, third and fourth robberies and 25 more years for the firearm used in my carjacking, all running back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back and on top of the 10-year prison term I received for the bank robberies and carjacking themselves. I have no chance at early release because Congress eliminated parole back in 1987.
 
Like all mandatory minimum penalties, this law transfers power to prosecutors to a dangerous degree; they alone can effectively determine sentences by deciding to file charges carrying stiff mandatory minimum prison terms, sometimes stacked on top of one another. Judges regularly complain that their hands are tied by prosecutors’ charging decisions. Nowhere else in the American criminal justice system are judges and juries so powerless.  
 
And mandatory minimums forsake rehabilitation in favor of retribution as the primary purpose of punishment. Because of their inherent arbitrariness and severity, mandatory minimum prison terms undermine the public’s confidence in the baseline fairness of the American criminal justice system.
It’s absurd to think that lawmakers envisioned treating defendants like me as recidivists, subject to sentences far longer than first-time offenders, simply because they were found guilty of multiple offenses in a single case. 
Mandatory minimums have helped to fuel a federal prison population explosion — from approximately 25,000 in 1980 to close to 184,000 today — with its  consequential financial costs, ruined lives and broken families.    
 
The SAFE Justice Act of 2017 and its Senate counterpart, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017 (which passed committee in mid-February), would bring much needed reform to Section 924(c)’s harsh penalties. Both bills make crystal clear that it is a recidivist statute, as it was always intended to be.  
But only the SAFE Justice Act of 2017 makes the change fully retroactive, and that's what would give inmates like me the possibility, but not the certainty, of having our sentences reduced if we demonstrate that we no longer pose a threat to society.  
So far I have served more than 15 years in federal prison. I’ve worked hard to rehabilitate myself and overcome the disease of criminality. I know I’ll have to serve more time. But, at some point, I should get a second chance.
Ian Owens, Register No. 11142-040, is serving a 115-year prison term at USP Pollock, a high-security federal penitentiary in Pollock, La.  Owens, who grew up in Lansing, has a projected release date of Dec. 31, 2102. Harlan Protass is a criminal defense lawyer in New York and an adjunct professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, where he teaches about sentencing.
]]><![CDATA[Inspirations]]>Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:52:29 GMThttp://www.mercyme924c.com/blog/inspirationsLove without limits


"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" -
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, famous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. -Marianna Williamson

"If you are neutral on situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" - Desmond Tutu

"If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission." --Anonymous

"Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out." --John Wooden

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them." --Walt Disney

 "Good things come to people who wait, but better things come to those who go out and get them." --Anonymous

"If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got." --Anonymous

 "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." --Eleanor Roosevelt

"The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." --Anonymous

"Don't raise your voice, improve your argument." --Anonymous

 "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." --Albert Einstein

 "Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting." --Anonymous

 “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” -
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it or escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it." Wendell Berry]]><![CDATA[Citing Fairness, U.S. Judge Acts to Undo a Sentence He Was Forced to Impose]]>Fri, 24 Oct 2014 01:53:11 GMThttp://www.mercyme924c.com/blog/citing-fairness-us-judge-acts-to-undo-a-sentence-he-was-forced-to-imposeJudge John Gleeson of Federal District Court in Brooklyn has spoken out against mandatory sentences that he believes are unduly harsh, like Francois Holloway's 57-year term.

Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Francois Holloway has spent nearly two decades of a 57-year sentence in a federal prison, for serious crimes that no one disputes he committed. There were armed carjackings, and his participation in an illegal chop shop, where stolen cars would be dismantled and sold for parts.

But the fairness of the mandatory sentence has been a matter of dispute, not only for Mr. Holloway, but also for a surprising and most effective advocate: the trial judge, John Gleeson.

As Mr. Holloway filed one motion after another trying to get his sentence and his case re-evaluated, Judge Gleeson, of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, began to speak out against those mandatory sentences that he believed were unduly harsh. Mr. Holloway’s 57-year term was more than twice the average sentence in the district for murder in 1996, the year he was sentenced.

More recently, Judge Gleeson began his own campaign on Mr. Holloway’s behalf, writing to Loretta E. Lynch, who is the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, to request that she vacate two of Mr. Holloway’s convictions.

The payoff from Judge Gleeson’s efforts will be apparent on Tuesday in a highly unusual hearing, when the judge is expected to resentence Mr. Holloway, who is 57, to time served.

“Prosecutors also use their power to remedy injustices,” Judge Gleeson wrote in a memorandum released on Monday. “Even people who are indisputably guilty of violent crimes deserve justice, and now Holloway will get it.”

Sentencing experts characterized Judge Gleeson’s effort as exceptional, saying it could be a blueprint for judges who want to revisit sentences that are legally required but, in their view, unjustifiably long.

“The normal attitude has been, ‘This is terrible, but the law is the law,’ ” said Douglas A. Berman, a sentencing expert at Ohio State University, referring to severe sentences. Rather than “waiting for Congress to act or waiting for the president to grant massive clemency,” he said, Judge Gleeson appears to believe that this is a problem that federal prosecutors and judges “not only ought to be tackling, but are better positioned to tackle.”

The judge’s effort reflects a softening national view of sentencing, moving away from what is now generally perceived as an over-incarceration problem stemming from the crime wave of the 1980s and ’90s. Some nonviolent drug offenders are getting more lenient treatment, and some 50,000 people in prison for those sorts of offenses may have their sentences reconsidered, in the most sweeping sentencing reform in decades.

But people like Mr. Holloway, who committed violent crimes, have basically been overlooked.

“No one is saying Mr. Holloway didn’t do what he was convicted of doing,” said Harlan J. Protass, who was appointed in May as his lawyer. “No one’s saying there was legal error along the way. This is sort of a case of mercy.”

Mr. Holloway was charged in 1995 with three counts of carjacking and using a gun during a violent crime (even though it was an accomplice, and not Mr. Holloway, who carried the gun), along with participating in the chop shop. The government offered him a plea deal of about 11 years. He turned it down after his lawyer assured him he could win at trial. Mr. Holloway did not win.

For the first conviction on the gun count, the law required Mr. Holloway to receive five years. But for the second and third convictions, the law required 20 years for each one, served consecutively, a requirement known as “stacking,” which some judges and lawyers argue sounds like a recidivism provision, although it can be applied for crimes, like Mr. Holloway’s, committed hours apart that are part of the same trial.

None of Mr. Holloway’s co-defendants, who all pleaded guilty, received more than six years.

At Mr. Holloway’s sentencing in 1996, Judge Gleeson said that “by stripping me of discretion,” the stacked gun charges “require the imposition of a sentence that is, in essence, a life sentence.” (The remainder of the 57 years was the 12 years required for the three carjackings.)

Mr. Holloway went to prison, where he was scheduled to remain until 2045. His appeal in his case, based on how prosecutors had to prove intent under the carjacking law, went to the United States Supreme Court, which affirmed, in a divided vote, his conviction and his sentence.

Last year, Judge Gleeson appealed to Ms. Lynch, pointing out that even the sentencing commission, which coordinates federal sentencing policy, told Congress in 2011 that stacking is “excessively severe and unjust.”

Mr. Protass, Mr. Holloway’s lawyer, discovered two precedents where prosecutors had agreed to drop convictions that prompted stacked sentences, which he used to help persuade the government to vacate the two convictions.

In Montana, a woman named Marion Hungerford accompanied her boyfriend, who was armed, on a spree of seven robberies, holding up casinos and convenience stores. Described in court papers as being “profoundly mentally disabled,” Ms. Hungerford was sentenced in 2005 to a 159-year sentence, 155 of which came from the legally mandated stacked gun charges. After she fought the sentence from prison, and with urging from the judge, the government agreed in 2010 to drop six of those seven gun convictions, and she was resentenced to 93 months.

In another Montana case, a medical marijuana distributor who owned guns was convicted of four counts of possessing a firearm during drug trafficking, along with other charges, which meant an 80-year sentence on the stacked gun charges alone. After the jury verdict but before sentencing, a federal judge pushed prosecutors and the defense to hold a settlement conference, where prosecutors agreed to drop three of those counts. Saying some mandatory minimums were “unfair and absurd,” that judge, Dana L. Christensen, sentenced the defendant, Christopher Williams, to five years.

But Ms. Lynch, the federal prosecutor, declined to vacate the convictions, suggesting that Mr. Holloway could ask for clemency.

In May, Judge Gleeson urged Ms. Lynch to reconsider. Clemency “is not a realistic avenue to justice for Holloway,” the judge wrote, because the Justice Department is prioritizing clemency for nonviolent offenders. He cited Mr. Holloway’s family, his clean disciplinary record and his participation in prison programs as evidence of his rehabilitation and his prospect of a normal post-prison life.

Ms. Lynch acquiesced.

At a hearing on the Holloway case this month, an assistant United States attorney, Sam Nitze, said that “this is both a unique case and a unique defendant,” citing his “extraordinary” disciplinary record and his work in prison.

Also, he said, three of Mr. Holloway’s carjacking victims have said that the 20 years that Mr. Holloway had served in prison was “an awfully long time, and people deserve another chance.”

Mr. Nitze agreed to vacate the two convictions, while emphasizing that this should not be taken as indicative of Ms. Lynch’s view on the stacking provision in other cases.

In his opinion issued last week, Judge Gleeson said that Mr. Holloway’s sentence illustrated a “trial penalty,” where those willing to risk trial could be hit with mandatory minimum sentences “that would be laughable if only there weren’t real people on the receiving end of them.”

Although Mr. Holloway’s federal prison time should be finished on Tuesday, he still owes New York State a minimum of nine more months before he is eligible for parole, stemming from a 1991 drug-selling conviction (he was transferred to federal custody in the carjacking case before he finished that sentence). That means he will most likely be transferred to a New York prison or jail until next year.

Judge Gleeson, though, seemed to feel he had moved the needle.

“There are no floodgates to worry about; the authority exercised in this case will be used only as often as the Department of Justice itself chooses to exercise it, which will no doubt be sparingly,” he wrote in his opinion. “But the misuse of prosecutorial power over the past 25 years has resulted in a significant number of federal inmates who are serving grotesquely severe sentences.”



]]><![CDATA[Attention!]]>Thu, 23 Oct 2014 01:48:39 GMThttp://www.mercyme924c.com/blog/attentionThis blog post regards a very serious and quickly expanding movement concerning the "stacking" provision of 18:U.S.C 924(c). As you may or may not know, there are approximately 3,000 people in the Federal Bureau of Prisons who, as first time offenders, are sentenced to unjust, severe, and lengthy prison terms as a result of 924(c) "second and subsequent conviction" clause.

These individuals who have been prosecuted for multiple 924(c) offenses stemming from the same indictment and prosecution are not recidivists and should not have been sentenced as recidivists under this policy. We are committed to making sure that people are adequately informed about this policy. Unfortunately, the great majority who have been prosecuted and or sentenced under 924(c) "stacking" provision operate in the blind when it comes to the policy as a whole. This of course means that family member, loved ones, friends, and potential advocates and supporters are left in the blind also.

Through our movement we're going to change this. More importantly, our objective is to bring awareness to the people on the outside so that they begin leaning on Congress to amend 924(c) "stacking" provision, and make it a true recidivist policy.

Of these roughly 3,000 people we can estimate the number of family members, loved ones, friends, and supporters there are out there; however these numbers balloon when we consider the amount of people connected to these people. What we have created is a general email that we are urging people to forward to Congress, The House and Senate Judiciary Committees, The U.S. Sentencing Commission, and The U.S. Department of Justice. This email is written from the vantage point of one who is aware of 924(c) "stacking" provision.

The email reveals that the sender is conscious of what the Judicial Conference, Representatives Robert Scott and John Conyers, The U.S. Sentencing Commission, and a host of others have repeatedly urged and recommended Congress to do regarding the amending of 924(c) "stacking" provision. The email puts them on notice that we now know. It quotes the positions of the aforementioned persons and entities. It then clarifies that the sender supports the proposed amendments suggested by these persons and or parties, and retroactive application of this judgment.

This email must be made available to the masses. We're exhausting every option, resource, and avenue through this movement. This Spirit of God is our spearhead. 

In addition to this email; we also have an online petition that people can read and educate themselves as to why their loved one received a prison sentence that doesn't come close to fitting the crime(s) they committed. This petition asks that they sign and encourages them to get everybody they can to log on and support the movement. We're asking everyone to post all of the relevant information to their Facebook page and other social media outlets. You may also become advocates by seeking support on foot and by word of mouth.

Please send an email to:  CitizensAgainst924c@gmail.com

You may enter the word “hope” on the Subject line and also in the Message area. Please wait about 60 seconds for your reply email instructing you on how to sign the petition and support this movement.

Again, we ask that you share the above information with all your family and friends and post to your social media pages and outlets.

We are looking forward to you coming home SOON and with your help of telling everyone that you know about us change will come soon. So get the word out and encourage others to help. It’s up to you now…Amen

Also have your family, friends and loved ones go to Mercy Me 924c and like this Facebook page. Coming soon will be the website and we are going to display your name, face and bring awareness to your case…Please pray for our endeavors….we are going to break every chain and our goal is to get you home soon….

-- 
"If you are neutral on situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" - Desmond Tutu]]>