DRUG 'LIFER' GETS SECOND CHANCE AND GOES FREE

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- A woman who was sentenced to life without parole for a
first-time drug offense was released yesterday after spending five years in
prison.

About two hours after a judge reduced her sentence to time served, Theresa
Wilson, 34, walked out of the Jefferson County Jail, arm in arm with her
husband.

"You've gotten a second chance. Don't blow it," Judge Tommy Nail said at
her hearing.

Wilson became a poster child for critics of mandatory sentencing in 1998,
when she was ordered to spend the rest of her life in prison because of a
law that branded her a "drug baron" when she sold a morphine mixture for
$150. The 1986 law mandated the sentence because the mixture weighed more
than 56 grams.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals last year ruled 3-2 that the life
sentence for a first drug offense was cruel and unusual punishment, sending
the case to Nail for a new sentence.

Wilson will be on probation for three years. She declined to comment as she
left the jail with her family.

"This has been real tough on the kids," husband James Wilson said. He said
he has been raising their two teenage children but "can't be a mother to them."

Wilson says she's changed since her arrest in 1996 for selling the drug to
an undercover police officer. At the time, she said, she was a drug addict
who didn't care about anything after her mother's death.

She was convicted in March 1998 and given the life sentence by now-retired
Judge J. Richmond Pearson.

"Judge Pearson only did what he had to do. He sat up there with tears in
his eyes," she said. "I was never angry. Just disappointed in the justice
system."

Wilson's attorneys, Mark White and Bill Bowen, said they took her case for
free to right an injustice. During Wilson's brief hearing, White said her
five years in prison were about double what is normal for someone convicted
of a first drug distribution offense in Alabama.

White said Wilson's life sentence demonstrates the problem with legislation
that calls for mandatory sentences and takes discretion away from judges.

Wilson has said she plans to work as a church secretary and eventually
wants to become a drug recovery counselor.