RETRIAL UPHELD AFTER DEA AGENT INTERVENED

Michael E. Fulcher was going down.

Already serving a 48-year sentence for theft, the Roanoke resident was
charged with dealing drugs inside Bland Correctional Center. Although
Fulcher claimed he had been working undercover to help bust dirty guards,
federal prosecutors pooh-poohed the notion and Fulcher was convicted of
running a drug ring.

Then, the night before Fulcher, now 42, was to be sentenced, U.S. District
Judge Jackson L. Kiser received a six-page, single-spaced letter from the
Drug Enforcement Administration agent on the case.

Donald Lincoln, who had used Fulcher as a snitch in other cases, wrote that
Fulcher may have thought he was working with police on the drug dealing.
While he had not authorized Fulcher's drug ring, Lincoln wrote, Fulcher had
made several telephone calls to one of the sheriff's deputies working with
the DEA about plans for an undercover operation.

"There is the very real possibility that Mr. Fulcher did feel that what he
was doing at the time was indeed under the auspices of the government,"
Lincoln wrote.

Thunderstruck, Kiser ordered hearings and then a new trial. On Thursday,
the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that Fulcher deserved another
chance.

The Fulcher case stands as an unusual counterexample to the FBI's recent
failure to turn over information in the case of Oklahoma City bomber
Timothy J. McVeigh. Here, defense lawyers say, a federal agent volunteered
information when he believed there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

"You've got to admire a guy who says: I'm going to put my job on the line,"
said Fulcher's attorney, C. David Whaley. "It's a gutsy move on his part,
but I think that's what they're supposed to do if there's an injustice
being done."

Reached at the DEA's Norfolk office, where he is now a supervisor, Lincoln
said he wrote the letter because "what's right is right." But he quickly
added: "I can't talk about the case."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph W.H. Mott said, "We intend to retry the
case. . . . We intend to show that Lincoln and the defendants had no actual
authority to commit the offenses."

Fulcher's case also opens a window into the murky world of drug
investigations, where law enforcement officers often rely on snitches who
have dirty hands.

A southwest Virginia native with a long record of arrests, Fulcher was an
informant for the DEA and other law enforcement agencies in the 1980s,
developing a close relationship with Lincoln, among others.

In 1991, he was linked to a series of thefts and sentenced to 48 years in
state prison. But Fulcher's police work didn't stop. While at Bland, he
helped stop an inmate tax-refund scam in 1993 and, six years later,
testified against a woman accused of hiring a hit man to kill her husband.

His current troubles started when a federal grand jury charged him and 23
other people with drug conspiracy in December 1998. Prosecutors alleged
that he masterminded a small-time marijuana ring, in which he bought drugs
from guards and inmates' relatives, repackaged them into teaspoon-size
servings and sold them to fellow inmates.

Fulcher's wife and mother were charged with money laundering because his
customers paid him by making out checks from their prison accounts to the
two women. Much of the evidence in the case -- including canceled checks --
had been collected by Fulcher and his mother, Ethel, Whaley said.

"My client has always maintained his innocence. He was trying to get
information for a sentence reduction," Whaley said. "Working with them in
the past, [he] had gone off on his own and generated information. That's
what he was trying to do here."

But prosecutors maintained that Fulcher was simply making money. After a
three-week trial, he was convicted of running a continuing criminal
enterprise and faced up to life in prison.

That's when Lincoln wrote his letter.

Prosecutors argued that Lincoln had become too close to Fulcher in their
years of working together.

But Kiser wrote in his opinion on the case, "If the Government truly
questions Lincoln's common sense . . . it would stop using him. Now that
Lincoln is saying something it does not like, the Government's attack on
his credibility rings rather hollow."

DEA spokesman Mike Chapman said he couldn't discuss the case because it is
under investigation.