PLEA TO FREE INMATE DYING FROM CANCER

Perhaps today, Beverly Dias can go home to San Jose to die. Or not.

She is three-quarters through a six-year sentence for cocaine possession at
the state women's prison in Chowchilla, a place so far that her family's
ancient cars have not been able to make it to visit as she grows weaker and
weaker.

Hepatitis C, and the resulting liver cancer, has coursed through her body,
swelling her abdomen, bruising her skin and making it painful to walk.
Prison doctors say she has less than six months to live.

"She's clearly dying," said Cynthia Chandler, who directs Justice Now, a
non-profit organization that provides legal services to female prisoners.
There is medical documentation, by both the prison doctor and the
consulting doctor at the University of California-Davis.

California's "compassionate release" law allows prisoners with a terminal
illness to go home to their families with the approval of the corrections
department and the sentencing judge. Less than a month after turning her
down, state Corrections Director Edward S. Almeida Jr. had a change of
heart and, in one of his final acts before resigning last week, approved
Dias' release.

Now her case lies in the hands of Judge Rene Navarro of Santa Clara County
Superior Court, who sentenced her. He is reviewing his original sentence today.

History Of Offenses

Dias, 51, is a loving mother, her supporters say. But she's not an angel.
She has a history of drug-related offenses, the result of her problem with
"an addiction to cocaine and the struggle to overcome it," wrote her
ex-brother-in-law, Roland Miller, who has known her for 20 years.

Her husband, Lew Dias, says he felt she was sincere about change when they
married 10 years ago. "For a long time she was good," he said, but her
conviction in 1999 came when "she had some bad friends and I was working a
lot of hours" in his electrical contracting business in boom times. She
completed a drug program in prison.

In any case, there is really not much time, and the odds of her release are
iffy, something that Lew, their 10-year-old daughter, Karma, and Beverly
Dias' 19-year-old son, Michael Banchero, know.

Last year there were 39 requests for compassionate release; only 12 were
granted. Some granted release are people who were convicted of violent
crimes such as murder. In September, for example, Vadilla Spragin, 71, was
released to spend her remaining months with her younger sister in
Riverside. She had set fire to her husband in 1982 because of years of
abuse. Genevieve Loza, convicted of killing her roommate in 1994, was
released in March to her mother's care.

Inmates die in prison all the time. We can shrug and think, "too bad, those
are the rules," even when it involves murderers who are so weak they can't
go to the bathroom by themselves. It's much harder to adopt that stance
when it involves a sorry soul who had an addiction problem.

Threat Called Unlikely

"Although Ms. Diaz's terminal condition does not negate the seriousness of
her criminal activity, given her limited life expectancy and severely
weakened condition, her ongoing threat within the community is unlikely,"
Almeida, the former corrections chief, wrote to Judge Navarro, using a
different spelling of her name.

And then there's the Dias' daughter, Karma, who wrote Almeida saying, "I
don't want my mommy to die but my Daddy says God is calling for her now. .
. . Will you please let her come home before God takes her to his home?"

What they want to do now, Lew Dias said, is prepare for the end as a family.

"My children know and understand when you break the law you must pay a very
high price, and a lot of loved ones suffer in the process," he wrote. "What
they don't understand is that their mother may have to die in prison."

If courts can release people like Vadilla Spragin, they can certainly free
Beverly Dias.