Inmate kills himself before his sentence could be cut

Not long after arriving at a high-security prison to serve a mandatory 40-year sentence for dealing drugs in Virginia, Frederick Turner wrote to his family.

“More and more I obsess with the idea of going to see Mom and Cody,” he said in the September letter sent from a Colorado prison.

A year earlier, Turner was arrested for the first time in his life. A year before that, he was sober for the first time after years of substance abuse driven by depression and suicidal thoughts. He started using meth after the death of his mother from ALS. Then his nephew Cody Brotherson, a police officer, was killed in a car chase. Turner relapsed.

In June, Turner, 37, killed himself in his cell. There was methamphetamine in his system.

His family and criminal justice reform advocates argue that a confluence of charging decisions, sentencing rules and prison policies led to an unduly harsh punishment that may have contributed to Turner’s decline and death.

The jurors who convicted Turner couldn’t know what sentence he would face; at least one later regretted his vote. The judge who sentenced him couldn’t change a prison term he deemed “excessive” and “wrong.” Even the Justice Department struggled to cut the punishment mandated by its own charging decisions. When he died, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were planning to visit Turner in an effort to help him cooperate in exchange for a rare sentence reduction.

The group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which has asked the Justice Department for an investigation of his death, has questioned the Bureau of Prisons’ decision to put Turner in a high-security facility, the weeks it took officials to deliver his body and his death certificate, and whether guards checked on him before his death. Two fellow prisoners say Turner killed himself when other inmates were at breakfast.

“I can’t say that I’m surprised, because my brother was desperate and depleting quickly,” said his sister, Mandy Richards, who lives in Virginia. In his last email, she said, he told her, “I am not a human.”

The BOP declined to answer questions about Turner’s case, citing an ongoing investigation.

Turner was arrested in 2017 as part of a sweeping crackdown on armed drug dealers in northern Virginia; he dealt meth for a supplier who also sold an undercover police officer a gun. Of the 48 people charged federally, Turner was the only one let out on bail pending trial; authorities did not allege he was violent.

But he was the one ultimately given the toughest sentence — harsher than major traffickers and murderers. His conviction came a few months too early for federal criminal justice reform, the First Step Act, that would have cut it in half.

G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, defended the aggressive prosecution, saying drug rings like the one Turner participated in lead to death. Still, after sentencing, at Ellis’ urging, prosecutors offered to support a reduced punishment if Turner offered information on other dealers and gave up his right to appeal. Such deals are almost always made only before trial.

“We were still trying to help this individual,” Terwilliger said.

Guidance from the Justice Department rewards cooperation above all else and is hardest on defendants like Turner, who confessed but then insisted on going to trial.

Turner, a former healthcare aide, left his family’s home in Utah not long after his father’s death in 2012 and moved to Virginia to help Richards, who has a severely autistic son. But after Brotherson died, he began using drugs again, stopped paying rent and was no longer welcome at his sister’s house.

Looking for meth, he connected online with a former car salesman named Bassam Ramadan. Within months he was working for and living with Ramadan in Woodbridge, Va. A neighbor soon tipped off police. When an undercover Virginia’s Prince William County police officer arranged a drug buy, Ramadan showed off his gun collection — leading the case to get rolled into the federal takedown. When the officer bought a gun from Ramadan, Turner got it from the car and helped package it.

Turner was charged with selling drugs with one count of using a firearm; prosecutors discussed dropping the gun charge if he pleaded guilty. He would have gotten a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence, with a reduction for cooperation. But he told his defense attorney he could not spend another day in jail.

He was convicted at trial on two drug and two firearm charges. The first gun count added five years to his sentence; the second, 25 years.

“If we could rewind and I knew what I knew now, I would have forced him to take any sort of deal,” Richards said. “My brother unfortunately really believed that a jury would see the truth and know that he was not that deeply involved in any of this.”

The truth, for Turner and his family, was that he had never been in trouble with the law before. He began selling meth to support his own addiction. He had never been violent; the only creature he had ever pointed a gun at was a lizard. Weeks before his arrest he came to his family for help; they were looking for an affordable detox program. While out on bond, he went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, got clean and held down two jobs.

But trials are not about that kind of truth. They are about this truth: Turner sold methamphetamines, repeatedly, with armed men who he knew were there to protect the drugs and make sure they got paid. He helped sell a gun.

When he was interviewed by an ATF agent after his arrest, he didn’t claim to have been threatened or coerced into dealing, as he later did at trial. He gave up the names of his co-conspirators, with no apparent fear. His claims on the stand of constant surveillance by Ramadan were, in the words of a prosecutor, “absolutely ridiculous.”

While Ramadan did threaten Turner over money and warned him that their suppliers were “dangerous people,” according to testimony, they maintained a close relationship. He even confided in Ramadan about his suicidal thoughts.

“I don’t want to get all Oprah’s couch with this or talk about it a lot, but I feel like someone should know, and you’re the only one (I) trust right now,” he said in one message.

Federal rules bar jurors from knowing how much time a defendant faces.