Man Serving Life Without Parole for $20 of Weed Freed

The dark ages are ending… –

Dec. 25, 2020 – For most of his sentence, Winslow’s chances of getting out were virtually nil. He is guilty of the crime he was convicted of, so there was no path to getting his conviction thrown out. And it was his fourth offense, precluding the possibility of catching the attention of a public sympathetic to the plight of “first-time offenders” — like activists did with Alice Marie Johnson — to appeal to the mercy of executive lawmakers with pardon power. Johnson was granted clemency by President Donald Trump after viral appeals from celebrities like Kim Kardashian, who stressed that Johnson had made just one mistake. Because Winslow wasn’t eligible for parole, it was unlikely he would get a grant of clemency from the Louisiana governor, as governors tend to defer to parole boards.

He didn’t have a lawyer until his case was taken up by the Innocence Project of New Orleans in 2019. That his case was taken up by a group whose primary goal is to take on cases in which the prisoner is innocent of the crime, and whose most high-profile work has been to overturn wrongful convictions in capital punishment cases, signals a shift in the advocacy community’s understanding of innocence, guilt, and punishment.