The Heartbreaking Story Of A Harmless Deadhead Sentenced To Die In Prison

[xchrom]

http://www.businessinsider.com/timothy-tylers-mandatory-minimum-sentence--life-in-prison-2013-7


Timothy Tyler's sister took this picture in her West Hartford, Conn. apartment when he was a teenager, around the time he went to his first Grateful Dead show.

Timothy Tyler was 25 when he was sentenced to die in prison.
Tyler, a Grateful Dead fan with no history of violence, got life without the possibility of parole for selling LSD to a police informant.

He'd never gone to prison before.

But a judge was forced to give him life because of two prior drug convictions — even though both those convictions resulted in probation.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/timothy-tylers-mandatory-minimum-sentence--life-in-prison-2013-7#ixzz2aSC3ie3C

[brooklynite]

1. What's the significance of him being A Grateful Dead fan?

...and why is he "harmless"?

To be clear, Tyler got busted for selling a lot of acid — 13,045 hits

I don't support "Three Strikes", but I'm not overly sympathetic to drug dealers.

[NoOneMan]

3. He was selling a virtually harmless substance

Whereas most establishments that sell harmful drugs like alcohol and tobacco are grossly rewarded with profits



Drug dealer? He was selling enlightenment. Who fuckn cares?

[Cronus Protagonist]

6. Cannabis seems a bit out of place on that chart

I would place it below mushrooms.

[NoOneMan]

9. I didn't do the study

And I'm not sure about that. Maybe if I did shrooms as much as cannabis I could subjectively compare, but psilocybin is more like a twice a year kind of thing. In any case, this study also doesn't look at the health benefits (both of these substances have plenty).

[DonRedwood]

4. Foolish to make society pay for 80 years to feed, house, medicate over drug sales....

Cheap student loans to help a kid get a career is a much better investment in our youth...

just saying.

[Recursion]

14. OTOH, how hard is it to not sell LSD to people?

I hate mandatory sentencing laws in general, but there's a very easy way to avoid going to jail for selling drugs, too.

[Major Nikon]

17. Would you feel the same way if 3 speeding tickets got you sent to prison for life?

[Jim Lane]

22. The linked article said this guy had mental health issues.

How hard is it to not stand naked out on the highway trying to build a dam in the dirt? He did that, too.

There just has to be a better way to deal with this case than to put a nonviolent 25-year-old away for life with no possibility of parole.

[Capt. Obvious]

7. That's for those who didn't see the picture of the drug dealer

It tips them off the subject is white.

[reusrename]

10. It's the independent entrepreneurs that are being jailed.

I would rather see it work the other way 'round, where connected dealers were rounded up while independents were allowed to prosper.

They can start with the Bush crime family and their heroin enterprise.

I guess you could say I'm not sympathetic to organized crime. It's probably easier to just look the other way and then you can blame the victims instead of the oppressors.

[Blue_Tires]

2. Ironically a former friend of mine used to follow Phish on tour and sell his "goods"

to the crowds and got busted in Connecticut...

According to him it cost all his meager possessions plus the $45 grand in profits he'd made on the tour, but he was able to bribe the prosecutor into a much lesser charge and only a few months jail time...

[closeupready]

5. It's not like it was a violent crime - if it were,

I'd not be real interested in hearing about him.

But since his crime was non-violent, I can't support a life sentence for this.

[Comrade Grumpy]

8. This is an obscenity. n/t

[Catherina]

11. +1 n/t

[n2doc]

12. I feel so much safer

[kelliekat44]

13. Three strikes was really designed for "those others"....thanks to a racist and immoral justice

system that the RWingers in Congress and state legislatures vote for.

[ET Awful]

15. I know of at least two others that are serving sentences of 20 years plus for the same type of sales

Both of them sentenced under absurd "carrier weight" laws.

What this basically did was allow sentencing to occur not on the actual amount of LSD being sold, but on the medium it was distributed on.

For example, you could be sentenced to 5 years for having 300 grams of LSD and an additional 10-15 years for having that LSD embedded in 500 grams of paper.

Or, put another way, if you had 1,000 doses of LSD on paper, you would do 3 times as long a prison term as if you had the same number of doses in liquid form.

Drug law and policy in this country has been and continues to be absurd.

[busterbrown]

16. What a fucked up Country!!

Abused and still an animal lover.. This just can not be true.. It’s heartbreaking...
Isn’t there an organization to help this kid? I would participate!. It could be anyone’s child.. People just don’t give a shit until it happens to one of their own...This is so American these days...

[Eleanors38]

18. Evidence that politics isn't all about "Follow the Money Trail!"...

prohibitionists, especially by using government criminal codes, do enjoy inflicting pain on others. Oh, how they long to do that:

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

attributed to Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow (1921)

[warrprayer]

20. great quote n/t

[Eleanors38]

21. Huxley was seen as one of the early counter-culture heroes during the 60s...

He seems to really get down to the world of "pleasure;" not just the day-to-day hedonism which rarely goes beyond the degrees of sensuousness one feels. He probed deeply into other kinds of pleasures, especially those reflected (whether he intended or not) in the social policy of what I call "prohibitionism." I find his outlook, as capsuled in the quote, consistent in most any kind of prohibition. Gin, gays, guns, ganja; reproductive rights and the new kid-on-the-block, tobacco (which WILL become full-blown prohibitionism very soon).

One can get lost in the old rabbit hole that everything is economically determined. Before our eyes, everyday, people act on impulses which are at best only tangentially related to money and economy: The drunk man or woman who pushes away from the bar to follow home an easy mark and get some easy, steamy sex; the millions of bullies on-line who take pleasure in both inflicting pain and that peculiarly pleasurable sensation of anonymity; the pol who with "sad" eyes sympathizes with the parents of a kid left in jail. But who would vote again for the legislation that put the kid there, in a heart beat.

Economic determinism does nothing but lend a cheap worldliness to anyone's argument.

[Scuba]

26. Scott Walker campaigns on this idea exclusively.

[Eleanors38]

27. He probably shares the far right's livid hatred for 60s counter culture.

[warrprayer]

19. America really isn't far ahead

of the dark ages.

[dreamnightwind]

23. Heartbreaking indeed

Someone asked upthread about a group working to stop this. From the article, a couple of links:

Families against mandatory minimums: http://www.famm.org/aboutus/StaffandBoard/JulieStewart.aspx

Legislation to give judges more flexibility in mandatory minimum cases: https://www.leahy.senate.gov/press/bipartisan-legislation-to-give-judges-more-flexibility-for-federal-sentences-introduced

As a longtime Deadhead myself (first Dead show 1979, still seeing the surviving members play music when I can) I found myself wondering how many people this happened to. Never heard of this guy before, which made me wonder if it's even all that unusual. Unbelievable, what a country we live in.

[davidn3600]

24. So this is going to deter all the drug dealers out there....right?

[B Calm]

25. What will this cost us taxpayers to lock this young man up for his entire life?

Sick drug laws in this country.

[Quantess]

28. Such a waste.

Sad.

[Babel_17]

29. When we vote, we are voting to help people like him (nt)

[free tim tyler]

30. Tim's my brother and has served enough time for his "crime."

[link:http://tbo.com/news/crime/mandatory-minimums-keep-many-nonviolent-people-behind-bars-20130817/|
http://tbo.com/news/crime/mandatory-minimums-keep-many-nonviolent-people-behind-bars-20130817/

This is a story that came out today. tbo.com/news/crime/mandatory-minimums-keep-many-nonviolent-people-behind-bars-20130817/

Below is an op-ed from Rand Paul.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/16/paul-the-madness-of-mandatory-minimums/?page=2

washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/16/paul-the-madness-of-mandatory-minimums/?page=2


[link:http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/16/paul-the-madness-of-mandatory-minimums/?page=2|
Not sure if I can put links in here.


He's already been in prison for over 21 years. How long is enough time?

[BainsBane]

31. Word of advice

Rand Paul and the Washington Times are not respected sources around here. This is a site for members of the Democratic Party, hence the name Democratic Underground.