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| Tulsa World |
| Patricia Spottedcrow, 26, a mother of four, was originally sentenced to 12 years after pleading guilty to selling $31 worth of marijuana. On Friday, her sentence was reduced to eight years. |
An Oklahoma judge has taken four years off a 12-year prison sentence for a first-time offender who sold $31 worth of marijuana to a police informant.
Associate District Judge Robert Davis decided to suspend the final four years of Patricia M. Spottedcrow’s sentence, but he just couldn’t resist a little condescension to go along with it, saying the young mother has “done better in the structure of the Department of Corrections than she had done during her adult years in the community.”
Even in reducing the draconian sentence by four years, the judge showed his arrogance and cowardice; a hearing had been scheduled for Thursday during which Spottedcrow’s lawyer would have been able to present all the evidence, but the judge evidently didn’t have the stomach to face a young mother of four doing a 12-year prison term for $31 worth of marijuana.
Spottedcrow, 26,
got the stiff sentence in October 2010 after selling the marijuana to an informant in December 2009 and January 2010. Her four children were ages 9, 4, 3 and 1 at the time of her sentencing. Her mother, Delita Starr, 51, was also charged.
Both Spottedcrow and her mother pleaded guilty before a judge without knowing what their sentences would be. (Please, never enter a “blind guilty plea” like this.) The results weren’t good for them: Spottedcrow got 10 years in prison for distribution and two years for possession, and her mother got a whopping 30-year suspended sentence, for marijuana, mind you.
Neither had any previous criminal record.
