A man sentenced to 5 life terms is released after nearly 30 years
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[October 19, 2024]
By PHILIP MARCELO
NEW YORK (AP) — A Brooklyn man who served 27 years in prison for robbery
and drug charges has been granted early release by the same federal
judge who sentenced him to five life terms behind bars, a penalty the
judge now says was overly harsh.
Walter Johnson, who once went by the street name “King Tut” and had been
questioned in connection with the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur outside
a Manhattan recording studio, was released from Federal Correctional
Institution in Otisville in upstate New York on Thursday following an
order from U.S. District Judge Frederic Block.
Johnson, now 61, said he intends to live with his family in Brooklyn and
give back to his community by “mentoring young men to steer clear" of
the choices he made, according to Mia Eisner-Grynberg, deputy
attorney-in-charge of Federal Defenders of New York, which represented
him.
“We are grateful for the humanity and the humility that Judge Block
exercised in reconsidering Mr. Johnson’s life sentence,” she wrote in an
emailed statement. “Mr. Johnson’s extraordinary rehabilitation in the
face of a death-in-prison sentence is a testament to his character and
reflects his growth and change.”
Block, in his 26-page ruling, cited changing judicial standards for his
decision to reduce Johnson’s sentence to time served, plus three years
of supervised release.
He said the 2018 First Step Act, which overhauled the federal sentencing
process, allowed judges to reconsider prior sentences and prisoners to
seek early release.
“I now believe that my sentences, though lawfully rendered, were
excessively harsh,” Block wrote. “Just like prisoners who have evolved
into better human beings during their lengthy periods of incarceration,
judges also evolve with the passage of years on the bench.”
Federal prosecutors, in opposing Johnson’s sentence reduction, detailed
the violent robberies that he and others had been arrested in connection
with between 1995 and 1996.
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“Nothing about the defendant’s current circumstances or time in prison
support a sentence reduction given the heinous nature of these crimes,”
they wrote in a letter to the judge in April.
But one of the main victims in those crimes, who prosecutors said
Johnson robbed multiple times and raped and sodomized while bound, was
among those who supported Johnson’s release.
U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace’s office
declined to comment Friday.
Eisner-Grynberg said Johnson was the only person ever sentenced to
mandatory life in prison out of the Eastern District of New York, a
federal jurisdiction that covers Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, under
the so-called Three Strikes law.
That federal statute, which was relatively new when Johnson was
sentenced, calls for mandatory life sentences for persons convicted of
felonies who have been previously convicted of a violent or serious
felony.
Eisner-Grynberg argued in court filings that Johnson’s sentence would
never have been imposed under current judicial standards. She also cited
his rehabilitation while behind bars, which included no disciplinary
infractions, helping found various programs for prisoners and
commendations from prison officials for his positive leadership.
Johnson, in a March letter to Block seeking early release, said his time
behind bars has been “bittersweet,” leaving him “fundamentally changed”
from the person who had a criminal history stretching back to 1977, when
he was just a 14-year-old-teen growing up in the East New York section
of Brooklyn.
“This sentence has given me an opportunity to do a great deal of
introspection and to reinvent myself,” he wrote in the four-page letter.
“I now take responsibility for the pain that I caused in society when I
was ignorant, reckless and selfish.”
Johnson closed by noting that Nelson Mandela had served 27 years in
prison in South Africa -- the same length of time he’d been
incarcerated.
“Please give me a chance to lead a life of peace and joy and giving
back, like Nelson Mandela did,” he wrote.
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