SMITHTON MAN RETURNED TO JAIL IN 13-YEAR-OLD CASE

Sheldon West's long legal odyssey -- more than a decade in the making --
won't end soon.

Due to inaction on the part of two judges and state bureaucratic
indifference, West, 44, of Smothton, never learned he was a wanted man for
nearly 10 years, and that he still must serve at least two more years to
satisfy an old debt to society.

West was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1989. He was release from
prison three years later after posting bond while appealing the conviction.
He continued living in the same home and working the same asphalt-laying
job for a decade.

And he never learned his appeal was denied.

Since his release on bond, West was convicted five more times for other
crimes before a new warrant stemmed from the 1989 charge was issued in
April. Picked up during a Beaver County traffic stop in June, West is now
in Camp Hill penitentiary's high security section for escaped convicts.

"I got up here, Camp Hill, and they told me I escaped," West said.
"Escaped! That's crazy.

"Listen, I'm not an angel. I made mistakes. But you can ask any person and
they'll tell you I'm a good person. I try hard. I've got kids. They need
me, and I need them."

Because a legal timeline bars him from future appeals, he can't challenge
his 1989 conviction.

West continues to insist he never did the crime. He's praying for either
the courts to toss the case or for Gov. Mark Schweiker to grant clemency
before leaving office in January.

State Department of Corrections officials would not comment on West's case.

On May 10, 1989, shortly after 8 p.m., Pittsburgh Zone 2 Police Detective
Thomas Derico handcuffed West at the corner of Elmore Street and Wylie
Avenue in the Hill District. Derico claimed he found five packets of
cocaine in the grass near West.

West only had $1.05 when arrested, but police insisted he was dealing. The
cocaine weighed less than half a gram.

Last year, Derico pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from an FBI
sting operation designed to clean up police officer corruption. After
pleading guilty to stealing money from drug dealers and doctoring evidence,
he was fired by the Pittsburgh police and now lives in Oklahoma, serving
out his probation.

Convicted during a 1990 trial before Judge Loran Lewis, West began serving
a 27- to 54-month sentence at Western Penitentiary.

Betty West, A Westmoreland County florist, paid defense attorney David
DeFazio $5,000 to appeal her son's sentence. She also put up a $20,000
property bond so Sheldon West could leave prison awaiting the Superior
Court's decision.

In 1993, the Superior Court rejected West's appeal. But no one told him or
his mother, the family claims.

Lewis never issued an order informing West of the Superior Court's
decision. The appeals panel notified the Allegheny County Clerk of Courts,
but workers there never alerted authorities that West should return to
jail. Prison records state the corrections department asked the Clerk of
Courts to return West in 1993, but no one did anything about it.

With Lewis in semi-retirement, then-President Judge Robert Dauer was
supposed to enforce any of Lewis' outstanding orders. But Lewis never
passed instructions on the West case to Dauer, according to Clerk of Courts
records.

In 1996, the corrections department sent Dauer a letter asking about
Sheldon West's whereabouts. But Dauer never issued an arrest warrant or
siezed Betty West's bond.

"My husband was sick and dying, and I was running a business, and I just
forgot about it, to be honest with you," Betty West said. "We thought
Sheldon's appeal was successful because he was out and no one told him it
wasn't successful. We just went about out business and forgot about it. I
guess they forgot about Sheldon, too."

Over the next six years, police arrested West six times in Allegheny and
Westmoreland counties for drunken driving, shoplifting and cocaine
posession. Sheldon West even appeared before Dauer on April 4, 1997, for
cocaine posession.

Dauer, who died in April, gave Sheldon West a year's probation. There was
no mention of the 1989 sentence.

Shortly after Dauer's death, Judge Gerard Bigley issued an arrest warrant
for Sheldon West after the corrections department issued another query
about the missing prisoner. Sheldon West re-entered the prison in June.

West's new attorney, Herbert Terrell, is seeking to spring his client. He
says judicial bureaucratic incompetence doomed Sheldon West's
constitutional right to further appeal a questionable conviction.

But while Terrell believes West will eventually go free, he worries the
wheels of justice might spin for several years--longer than West's sentence.

"I concede it might take two years, maybe more," said Terrell, the
Pittsburgh NAACP's legal director and constitutional attorney. "In the
meantime, Mr. West cannot fight his earlier conviction. He cannot go back
to work. He cannot enjoy the freedom he thought he held for nearly a decade."

Pennsylvania law has held a man should serve out the remainder of his
sentence, no matter the delay. But after weeks of research nationwide,
Terrell can't find a case where a convict was out so long without learning
his appeal had failed.

Terrell vows to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Betty West already
has collected more than 2,000 signatures on a petition to the governor,
mostly because several black churches in Pittsburgh and Atlanta are calling
for clemency for West.

Currently, each prison has a clerk who, occasionally, checks a file on her
desk listing the names of inmates who never reported back to jail. In
West's case, officials check that file three times during the last 10 years.

The appeals courts can't backtrack to see which convicts weren't notified
because officials mistakenly tossed out every docket note from 1983 to
1994. Reporting services, like Westlaw and the Jenkins Law Library in
Philadelphia, typically receive only what the courts send them--often no
more than decisions and attorney briefings.