Glamour News Update

FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST!

When Glamour provided Amy Ralston Pofahl as she was living without hope
after nine years behind bars, we had no idea that with some pressure, we
would help convince President Clinton to free a woman unjustly sentenced to
24 years. This is her story.

DON'T DO THIS TO YOURSELF, AMY," Amy Ralston Pofahl silently cautioned on
July 7 as she made her way across the bleak prison compound to her case
manager's office. They probably just want to talk to you about something
stupid, she thought. She tried to suppress any hopeful notion that she
might be getting positive news regarding her lengthy sentence.

Indeed, the last time Ralston (she no longer uses her married name) was
abruptly summoned to a case manager's office at the FCI Dublin correctional
facility outside of Oakland, California -- the medium-security prison where
she'd spent the previous nine years of her life -- was Christmas Eve, 1999,
a traditional time for presidential pardons and clemencies to be granted.
Ralston, now 40, a willowy 5'9" blond with the peaceful beauty of Joni
Mitchell, was serving a 24-year sentence, without the possibility of
parole, for a first-time drug offense. She'd been convicted of a crime with
a harsh mandatory sentence; the judge had no choice but to impose it. Since
losing her appeal three years earlier, Ralston had been pouring all her
energy into organizing a massive letter-writing campaign to government
officials. Every day she spent hours in the prison's legal library,
fighting for use of one of the eight often broken typewriters shared by
more than 900 inmates.

Ralston had enlisted members of Congress from Hawaii to Maryland to write
to federal pardons attorney Roger C. Adams in Washington and to President
Clinton on her behalf. Her other legal options exhausted, Ralston knew an
executive clemency was her last hope of freedom before turning 52. So when
she was ordered to report to the case manager's office last Christmas Eve,
she could practically taste the freedom she thought she was about to be
granted. "I really was convinced it was going to happen."

Instead, Ralston found that her single-minded hopes had painted a cruel
mirage. The case manager had called her in to see a woman from the prison
commissary, who wanted only to discuss payment . for some clay Ralston had
requested -- she'd taken up ceramics to pass the time. Back in her cell,
where no one could see her, Ralston collapsed crying. "I was so angry with
God because I thought I was the butt of this huge cosmic joke...having my
hopes get so close and then this," she recalls. So Ralston was
understandably reticent six months later, on July 7 of this year, as she
reported to a different case manager, one she'd been friendly with for some
time, who had been frantically looking for her all morning. (Ralston had
been at the infirmary getting a regular checkup.) But this time, Ralston's
dream was coming true. "My case manager just looked at me -- she's a real
nice lady -- and said, 'You're going home.' There's this chair there, and I
collapsed -- I just lost it. I cried, but not as much as I thought I would
because I was so excited."

So were Ralston's many supporters, who had been campaigning hard for her
release. After an article about the injustice of her case appeared in the
June 1999 issue of Glamour, Ralston became the poster girl for the push to
reform harsh federal mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws. Enacted in the
late eighties in an attempt to quell the nation's crack epidemic, the laws
were meant to take drug dealers and kingpins out of business and off the
streets by beefing up existing sentences with additional mandatory
sentences ranging from one year for dealing in a drug-free school zone to
30 years for using a machine gun during the commission of a crime. Judges
are allowed almost no leeway, not even in cases involving small amounts of
narcotics. Under the conspiracy statutes of these same laws, a person found
guilty of committing just one overt act in a drug conspiracy -- something
as innocent as taking a phone message for a friend who turns out to be a
drug dealer -- could be sentenced as if she were the leader in the entire
operation. It's easy to see today how the mandatory drug laws have failed.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in 1999 that of the more than
20,000 drug sentences in 1998, only 41 were for actual ringleaders, as
defined by the so-called "kingpin statute." Too many of the rest of the
sentences were for women like Ralston.

The Biggest Mistake of Her Life

When she was 24, Amy Ralston, a part-time model and office temp in Dallas
who'd been raised on a farm in Arkansas, met and, one year later, married
Sandy Pofahl, a charismatic, wealthy businessman and Stanford University
Law School graduate. Only after they had been separated for a year and her
husband was arrested in 1989 did she learn that he was the mastermind of a
syndicate that made and distributed the illegal drug Ecstasy. And that's
when she broke the law: To help Sandy make bail when he was in jail, she
helped him recover some of his drug profits -- under his direction -- by
removing the cash from various stashes around town. "I really was stupid,"
she says. "I just threw caution to the wind and thought, Whatever needs to
be done I will do it." Ralston had no idea that under the tough federal
conspiracy statutes, she would be considered as guilty as if she were the
organization's linchpin. Since her husband's operations were so vast, the
judge had no choice but to sentence her to 24 years with no chance of
parole -- his hands, Ralston recalls him saying, were tied. The kicker: The
only way she or any other minor player in a drug crime could possibly
bargain for a reduced sentence was by providing the government with
information on others involved in the conspiracy.

Ralston had been kept in the dark about her husband's dealing and didn't
want to tell what little she knew about her husband just to help herself.
People like her -- most often the wives and girlfriends of the major
dealers -- know so little about the operations that even if they are
willing to inform on others, they have no useful information to bargain
with, whereas the bigger players can always sell out the minor players.
Which is exactly what Sandy Pofahl did: He told all, implicating his wife
and several of his associates, and served only four years behind bars in
Germany (where he was arrested), while his wife got 24 for refusing to
incriminate him.

While there was no love lost between Amy and Sandy, she still says, "I
can't sell someone out in order to save my own suffering. It's not how I
was raised," Ralston does not paint herself as an angel -- she admits what
she did was wrong. "But I think the sentences were unfair. I should have
gotten his, and he should have gotten mine." Even though the sentence was
so clearly disproportionate to her crime -- consider that the average
sentence for sexual assault is 2.6 years -- she stood scant chance of being
released. The Clinton administration has been criticized for its stinginess
in handing out clemencies -- in 1999, Clinton granted only 12 out of more
than 1,000 waiting for his review, Fortunately, he came to agree that
Ralston's sentence was unfair and granted clemency to her and to three
other women and one man with similar histories. "I am so, so grateful,"
says Ralston, cozily hugging her knees on her parents' flowered couch in
Charleston, Arkansas, just over a week after her release. "Every day is
like Christmas, New Year's and my birthday rolled into one. I'm still
fascinated by being free, and I hope to some degree I don't lose touch with
that."

Amy's Lost Decade

As beautiful as she looks now, her face glowing with the joy of freedom,
it's hard not to notice the more energetic, more radiant version of Ralston
that smiles in eighties makeup and hair in the pre-arrest snapshots she
spreads out on the coffee table. "When I was arrested, I was on the cusp of
turning 31," she says haltingly. "I feel like I've aged so much and that
I've lost a whole decade of my most productive years -- and not just to
have children. By the time you're 30 you figure out what your strengths are
and you want to achieve things," she explains ruefully. "I look at these
pictures, and I'm like, Oh, OK I lost that period, that priceless pocket of
my 1ife. I've got to make up for it."

Ralston, dressed in a flowered skirt that was in storage while she was in
prison - tucked away for so long that it's back in style - fingers a beaded
pouch she wears around her neck. It was made by Lau Ching Chin, one of
Ralston's two roommates for about five years in her 8-by-11-foot cell, to
raise money to support Chin's children (Ralston says they're now 14, 15 and
17) on the outside. "Her case is even more egregious than mine," says
Ralston. Chin, who is Chinese and in her early forties, simply translated a
phone call for her drug dealer boyfriend, who spoke no English. "[For that]
she got 17 years. Her prosecutor said that if they trusted her enough to
interpret this phone call, then surely she must have been trusted enough in
this organization to have done other calls," Ralston explains. Yet like
Ralston, Chin was sentenced as if she'd been the leader.

Eric Sterling is an attorney who as counsel to the House Judiciary
Committee was a principal aide in developing the mandatory minimum
drug-sentencing 1aws back in 1986 and coauthored the mandatory
drug-sentencing laws. Now he works full time as the president of the
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation to get them repealed. He explains that
in their zeal to curb the nation's drug problem, legislators drafted the
laws to be as broad and inclusive as possible so that they could go back to
their constituents and say they put a large number of people behind bars.
Bur they went too far. "It was cuckoo," Sterling admits now. "And it's
shocking to see how long the sentences are and how small the number is of
major traffickers who have been incarcerated."

Sterling is encouraged by President Clinton's granting of clemency to
Ralston and the four others and hopes that his action signals a shift in
the political winds when it comes to more reasonable sentences for drug
offenders. "It's hard to say what will happen" when a new president is
elected, explains Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project,
a nonprofit research and advocacy organization on criminal justice policy.
"Neither Bush nor Gore has expressed a good deal of concern about mandatory
sentencing." When contacted by Glamour, neither of the two candidates would
comment on the Ralston case specifically. As for the laws in general, they
both offered a noncomment: "He supports as a general rule tougher
sentencing requirements, but he also believes it is important to be very
thoughtful and careful about how to apply them," says Gore campaign
spokesman Jano Cabrera. Bush has taken even less of a stance: "When he is
president, Governor Bush will approach pardons on a case-by-case basis,"
says Ray Sullivan of the Bush campaign.

There is a bill, sponsored by Democratic representative Maxine Waters of
California, to repeal these laws, but neither Sterling nor Mauer sees it
passing in the current Congress. Politicians of any stripe are loath to
appear soft on drugs, especially in an election year. "It's a bipartisan
madness -- most members of Congress are addicted to political rhetoric
around drugs," Sterling explains. "Because the mike and the cameras are on,
they want to talk tough."

Freedom Campaign

Luckily for Ralston, not all politicians were afraid to get behind her
cause. Representatives Barbrara Lee of California, Eddie Bernice Johnson of
Texas and Patsy Mink of Hawaii, all Democrats, were three of the most
outspoken, writing numerous letters to the President and urging their
colleagues to do the same. Former Arkansas senators David Pryor and Dale
Bumpers, also Democrats, both lobbied hard for Ralston. Pryor, now the
director of Harvard University's Institute of Politics, first read about
Ralston's case in Glamour. "I read it and I got so angry at it, and I said,
'This couldn't happen in our country," says Pryor, who, with Bumpers,
traveled to Washington and argued for two hours in front of pardon attorney
Adams on Ralston's behalf. "I couldn't find anyone anywhere who could
justify keeping this woman rotting in a cell. She spent one quarter of her
life in prison."

Once she received her clemency on the morning of July 7, Ralston was
released with amazing speed: She was out the door and into the arms of her
boyfriend, Mark Balsiger, 50, a food-service provider in El Paso, Texas, by
early that afternoon. The two made contact four years ago through a mutual
friend who taught creative writing at the facility where Ralston was
incarcerated and thought they might like each other. They fell in love via
mail and, later, phone calls and visits, during which the only physical
contact they were allowed was a quick "kiss in" and "kiss out." Balsiger
was staying only an hour away, in San Francisco, and had visited her just
the day before. "Normally, when you get a call from a federa1 prison,
there's this recording telling you it's a call from prison before the
person can actually speak to you," he told Glamour. "This time, it was Amy
saying, 'Mark, Mark,' just crying. Finally, I heard, 'I'm free, I'm free.'"

Balsiger was on his cell phone to Ralston's mother later that day when he
saw Ralston come through the prison gates, toting boxes of legal documents
dating back to her arrest nine years earlier. The two hugged and leapt for
joy. "We looked like two pogo sticks in the parking lot," recalls Balsiger.
"Even the guard was grinning, and you don't often see guards grin." The
couple spent a romantic night at an inn in Sausalito, fielding phone calls
from friends, the media and well-wishers who had heard about Ralston's release.

Other than her legal files, Ralston had walked out of prison with nothing
more than a small bag of makeup. "I tried to leave everything I had -- it
wasn't much, some sweats and some dress shoes for visits -- for the other
women in there," she explains. "They really need it." Balsiger took her
shopping for clothes, since all she had was the T-shirt and sweatpants she
was wearing. Her first meal was Thai food -- curry chicken with peanut
sauce. "All the food was like sensory overload," she says. "It's like a
burst goes off in your mouth because you've been eating hospital slop and
crap, baloney and, at best, lime Jell-O. Then you get something like that
and your taste buds are like, Oh, my God."

Ralston is back in Arkansas with her family, reveling in the delicious food
she's not able to eat, figuring out how she can spend more time with
Balsiger -- she's not allowed to leave western Arkansas for six months, and
he's working in Texas -- and going through the clothes she hasn't seen for
dose to 10 years. "My girlfriend is going to take me shopping," says
Ralston. "She told me, 'Whatever you do, don't wear shoulder pads -- I
don't want to see you in the Dos and Don'ts section in the back of Glamour.

As much as she's looking forward to being with Balsiger and finding a job
(preferably office work), Ralston is haunted by the face of a friend she
left behind at FCI Dublin. Patricia Lockett, who is serving a 24-year
sentence for drug conspiracy charges, is also petitioning for clemency.
"She used to say, "I just know we'll get [our release] in July" recalls
Ralston sadly. "So when I got mine, she looked just devastated. She was so
happy for me, but I could see it in her eyes -- this fear of "I'm being over."

"I said, 'Patricia, keep fighting. You're next.

[sidebar]

FREED AFTER 11 YEARS

By Diana Ingber Stein

She was sentenced to 15 1/2 years, but both the judge and the prosecutor
supported Serena Nunn's release.

IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE, but after more than a decade behind bars
praying to get out, Minneapolis native Serena Nunn was stalling
administrators who were trying to rush her out the door. "I wanted my
family to arrive and see me walk out that gate," she says.

Convicted in 1989, at age 20, for her minor role in a Minneapolis drug ring
- -- driving her dealer boyfriend to a few meetings -- Nunn received an
astounding 188-month prison term (15 1/2 years). Her refusal to turn
informer resulted in one of the harshest punishments the mandatory minimum
sentencing guidelines allowed. But after spending all of her twenties
behind bars in several prisons across the country, Nunn, like Amy Pofahl,
received a presidential commutation on July 7.

Nunn largely owes her freedom to a young San Diego lawyer, Sam Sheldon of
the firm Cozen and O'Connor, who read about her case in 1997 and offered to
take it on without fee. At his urging, the judge in the original case wrote
a letter to President Clinton criticizing the law that forced him to impose
the sentence. Several politicians, and even the original prosecutor,
followed suit. "Freedom always seemed so out of reach," says Nunn, who,
like Pofahl, was profiled in Glamour's June 1999 article about unfair
sentencing laws.

Prison-release procedure required that Nunn be driven to a nearby drop-off
point. ("The administrators said I had to be out in two hours!" she says.)
On the way, she spotted Sheldon and her mother and sister in a passing
limo. They all pulled over for a tearful roadside reunion, Nunn, who earned
an Associate's degree in prison, is now 31 and living in an apartment in
Phoenix. She hopes to get her B.S. in business, then go on to law school.
Perhaps some of Sheldon's commitment has rubbed off. "When you're involved
in a case for the liberty of a person you believe in, there's no greater
responsibility," he says. "And when you win, there's no greater feeling."

Notes from MAP:

Referenced: A Crime Against Women:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99/n581/a01.html

Cited: Criminal Justice Policy Foundation
http://www.cjpf.org/

The Sentencing Project
http://www.sentencingproject.org/

Webpages with pictures and stories about Amy Ralston Pofahl:

http://www.hr95.org/

http://www.november.org/wallAmyRP.html

Some of the organizations concerned with mandatory minimums:

Families Against Mandatory Minimums:
http://www.famm.org/

The November Coalition:
http://www.november.org/

Human Rights and the Drug War:
http://www.hr95.org/

Jubilee Justice 2000:
http://www.jubileejustice.org/

The Coalition for Jubilee Clemency:
http://www.cjpf.org/clemency/

MAP's topical news shortcuts:

Incarceration
http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm

Women
http://www.mapinc.org/women.htm