“The week has been quite a transition, as you may imagine, but I now do long pre-dawn walks beneath the Sangre de Cristo mountains and watch the sun rise over vast ranges of pino, sage and juniper,” he said. “Flocks of joggers all wave or say ‘Hi,’ some towing herds of goat (only in Santa Fe).
“Not many have survived two life sentences, Dennis,” he continued. “There are many in there (Tucson penitentiary) my age and with Covid exposure, so I expect the fentanyl issue was the definitive force, though the Court hardly could admit it.”
Since the pandemic struck in March, Leonard and his cellmate had been locked down twenty-three hours a day. The virus still managed to sneak inside, indiscriminately infecting five guards and eleven inmates. The isolation was meant to flatten the curve and save lives, just as quarantine is supposed to do on the outside, but prisoners can’t even get out to walk the dog or visit the grocery store. Forget about binging Netflix for days on end. Most of the time in solitary, Leonard couldn’t even communicate through CorrLinks, the Bureau of Prisons-sanctioned email system. He had to resort to pen and paper and wait for weeks for a reply.
In ordering his release, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Kansas, J. Thomas Marten, made few concessions. Leonard had been found guilty and went to prison twice on drug convictions before the Wamego bust. Three strikes and he was officially out.
Thus, letting him go could not be characterized as absolution. Nor did his early (1996) warnings at Harvard about fentanyl being the next deadly drug on the horizon figure into Judge Marten’s decision. Age, health, and rehabilitation tipped the scales in Pickard’s favor.
“Pickard’s offenses were serious but having spent two decades in prison he has been seriously punished,” wrote Marten.
Ironically, President Trump’s unpredictable impulse to commute sentences of his friends and favorites also played a role. In December of 2019, the President signed into law the First Step Act, easing strict mandatory sentencing for the first time since Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs. Kim Kardashian’s successful campaign to free convicted Tennessee cocaine dealer Alice Marie Johnson in June 2018 led to broad prison reform legislation. The trend toward commuting harsh sentences like Pickard’s seemed to have played a role in Marten’s decision.
“The government has not challenged the defendant’s contention that, at 74 years of age, he does not pose any significant risk to society, or that he has not engaged in substantial efforts at rehabilitation,” wrote Judge Marten.
Leonard turns seventy-five in October. He’s rail-thin, but relatively healthy for a man his age. Despite the alarming catalogue of chronic medical issues that appear in Judge Marten’s release order, he’s already managed to land a job at a law firm, putting his years of paralegal training inside Tucson FCI into practice.
Leonard wants to spend his remaining years making up for lost time with family. He reveled in the send-off he was able to give Duncan when his son left Santa Fe recently to study neurology at a nearby university.
But in a broader sense, all the time he has spent behind bars has not tempered his resolve about the fundamental freedoms denied by a government that seeks to “protect” its citizens from drugs. Leonard Pickard was sent away forever for making a drug that arguably has never killed anyone, while opioid mills like Purdue Pharma, McKesson, and Cardinal Health continue killing thousands with impunity. Don’t get him started on the millions of legal deaths from nicotine and alcohol sanctioned by the federal government.
I’ve had to “stop the presses” a few times in my long career as a newspaper reporter, but this is a first in my incarnation as a book author.
And I can say unequivocally that far from being an unforeseen chore, this last assignment for Operation White Rabbit has been a genuine pleasure.
—Dennis McDougal, August 2020
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