He turned almost 2000 pieces of crap back out on the streets to prey on society again.
Carol Denise Richardson was sentenced to life in prison in 2006. Her crime? Possessing 50 grams or more of cocaine. Prosecutors said she intended to distribute the drugs. But what she had was crack cocaine and, like many in prison, she claimed the chunks of cocaine were to feed her own addiction — that she had no intention to share or sell them.
When Barack Obama was president, he agreed with criminal justice reform advocates who argued current laws unjustly treated those found with crack cocaine the same as those caught with more expensive, but less bulky, pure form of powder cocaine. Since prosecution and sentencing standards are based on weight, a handful of rocks of crack could result in much harsher punishment.
Based on this argument, Obama chose to grant clemency to a record number of prisoners who had committed nonviolent drug-related offenses. In 2016, Richardson became one of them. But now, she has been ordered to return to federal prison after violating the terms of her supervised release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said Thursday.
Richardson, a 49-year-old resident of Texas City, was originally convicted in 2006 for “conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute 50 grams or more of cocaine as well as two counts of possession with the intent to distribute cocaine base.” At the time, U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison sentenced her to life in federal prison, noting that she had an extensive criminal history.
Richardson had already served about a decade of her life sentence when she received a reprieve last year, under an agreement that her release would be supervised for 10 years. For Richardson and hundreds of other nonviolent drug offenders granted clemency, the truncated prison sentence was a rare opportunity to reenter society. During his two terms in office, Obama commuted a total of 1,715 prison sentences, more than any other president in history.
Richardson was released from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons on July 28, 2016.
However, on April 13, less than a year after her release, Richardson was arrested for theft in Pasadena, Tex., a Houston suburb.
According to acting U.S. attorney Abe Martinez, Richardson also violated four other terms of her release, including a failure to report any “law enforcement contact” to her probation officer within 72 hours.
“She has also failed to maintain regular contact with the U.S. Probation Office and failed to report that she had been terminated from her employment with Home Health Providers for abandoning her position,” Martinez said in a statement. “She also failed to report a change in her residence. In fact, as of May 15, 2017, attempts to reach her were unsuccessful, and her whereabouts were unknown.”