A Louisiana man has been released from prison after his case caused widespread outrage for its obscene severity, according to WWL-TV. 

Due to Louisiana's draconian repeat offender law, Fate Winslow was given a life sentence without parole after being arrested in Shreveport, Louisiana, for selling two undercover cops $20 worth of marijuana in 2008. His case became a sadly iconic example of how unnecessarily harsh the country's drug laws are, particularly when it comes to Black offenders. 

“I was so happy to get out. A life sentence for two bags of weed? I never thought something like that could happen,” Winslow told WWL-TV as he walked out of the prison on Wednesday.

“Rolling Stone magazine did articles about me. I was in a bunch of other articles and two documentaries. The other inmates could never believe it. They always said, ‘You’re doing life for a bag of weed,’” he said. 

As the Rolling Stone article noted, Winslow wasn't even the person who had the drugs. He was homeless in 2008 living in Shreveport when the two officers approached him with $20 and asked him to get them two bags of marijuana. Winslow borrowed a friend's bike and bought the weed from a dealer, who was white.

“I wasn’t lookin' to sell drugs. But when you homeless, every dollar counts,” he told Rolling Stone from prison in 2017. “This is the world we live in. The dealer sold the weed and gave me five dollars… now I got life.”

According to Rolling Stone, the police found their marked $20 on the white dealer but never arrested him. Yet Winslow was arrested and convicted. Louisiana has a four-strikes law that makes the penalty for a fourth offense a minimum of 20 years in prison with hard labor and a maximum of a mandatory life sentence without parole.

Winslow was convicted for two burglaries when he was 17 and 27 as well as cocaine possession at 37, so he was deemed a habitual offender. Ten white jurors ruled him guilty after just one hour of deliberation while two Black jurors dissented.

At the time, Louisiana was one of two states in the country that still allowed convictions on nonunanimous juries. A case related to the practice, colloquially known as "Jim Crow Juries," was heard before the Supreme Court two weeks ago, as Blavity previously reported. 

Over the years, Winslow has corresponded with reporters and cannabis activists, describing the horrific conditions of the notorious Angola prison. 

“This is a place no one wants to be. There was forty people in a dorm now there’s eighty-six. They put bed on top of bed but they did not add one more toilet or one more shower. Thanks god I am living that is ALL I can say,” he said of the prison in 2017. 

Winslow spent 12 years in Angola before he was released on Wednesday. 

Innocence Project New Orleans director and lead attorney Jee Park worked on Winslow's case and told WWL-TV and Yahoo News that he was re-sentenced as "time served" after lawyers appealed his sentence due to ineffective counsel. Winslow was homeless at the time of his arrest and could not afford a lawyer, so he was provided with a public defender. 

“You read the transcript of his trial and you’re just horrified about what happened. [His attorney] doesn’t object when he gets sentenced to life. He doesn’t file a motion to reconsider… he doesn’t do anything. He just says, ‘Sorry, you got a guilty verdict, you’re going to prison for the rest of your life,’” Park said to Yahoo News.

“He gave no individualized factors about Fate that would give the judge reason to depart from the mandatory minimum sentence. Judges can do that under the right circumstances, but the lawyer has to do the work — present the evidence. He did none of that. The facts of this particular case are crazy," she added. "Even if you gave the benefit of the doubt to the officer that it happened exactly as he tells it, it’s still so sympathetic. And Fate himself is such a humble, gentle person. You meet him and you think, how can this human being die in prison?”

Alex Rubenstein, Winslow's lawyer at the time, was interviewed by the Daily Beast in 2015. He never brought any witnesses or presented any evidence. His opening statement was 30 seconds, according to Yahoo News. 

“He was distributing marijuana. I can’t really be sympathetic. You have to be realistic about it, we don’t have the best clientele in the world. I’m not saying they’re all losers — we win some cases, we try our best — but sometimes there just isn’t anything there,” Rubenstein told the Daily Beast.

But many have disagreed, and Winslow's case became a terrifying example of how the justice system unfairly punishes certain people. 

“There are hundreds of individuals serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes in Louisiana. He received an obscenely excessive sentence given his life circumstances and crime, and today, we are correcting that unconstitutional, inhumane sentence,” Park told WWL-TV. 

His daughter, Faith Canada, has set up a GoFundMe for him as he gets back on his feet and reunites with family.

Winslow told Yahoo News that his release was “a day of redemption.”

“I get my freedom back, I get my life back. There are no words that can really explain my feelings right now. Yes, I did serve 12 years of my life for marijuana, a drug that is now legal for recreational and medicinal use. I never did feel like I deserved all that time for something like that,” he said. 

“Upon my release, I just want to go get my kids and grandkids and try to make some memories with the time that I have left on this earth with them," Winslow continued. "Twelve years are gone that I can never get back, but today redemption has come."

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