Over 60% in Chicago seeking early prison release under Trump’s First Step Act go free

Federal prisoners aiming to get out early under the law that Republicans, Democrats, the ACLU and Kanye West backed include crooked Chicago cops and gang kingpins.

By Frank Main and Jon Seidel  Jun 26, 2020, 5:30am CDT

The American Civil Liberties Union and President Donald Trump don’t agree on a lot. But in 2018, Trump signed a law called the First Step Act that had the backing of a broad range of supporters including the ACLU, Republicans and Democrats and Kanye West, who had lobbied the president during a White House visit.

The law gives prisoners convicted of federal crimes a chance to get their time behind bars shortened and lets elderly and sick inmates seek compassionate releases.

In Chicago, hundreds of prisoners, including some of the nation’s most notorious criminals, are using the law to try to get out of prison. And their odds of getting out are good, a Chicago Sun-Times examination of 200 of those cases has found. 

Judges here have approved more than 60% of the requests they’ve ruled on, court records show, often over the objections of prosecutors. They so far have granted sentence reductions in 75 of the 200 cases. Forty-five requests were denied. The rest are awaiting a ruling.

Frank Main / Sun-Times

Five men serving life sentences have been sprung, including James Yates, convicted in 1998 in a sensational drug case against the Gangster Disciples, a notorious Chicago street gang.

Yates, 51, wasn’t expecting a break. “I was kind of skeptical,” says Yates, who benefited from a provision of the First Step Act that involves crack cocaine.

In 2010, Congress reduced the huge disparity in punishments between crack and powdered cocaine. In the 1980s and 1990s, African Americans had been hit the hardest by the harsher sentences for crack. The First Step Act allows people convicted of crack offenses before 2010 to ask for their prison terms to be recalculated because of the sentencing disparity.

In April, over prosecution objections, U.S. District Judge Elaine Bucklo cut Yates’ life sentence to time served.

“To sit in the yard and take in the fresh air, I don’t really know how to put words on it,” says Yates, now back home in Chicago.

Three of his co-defendants also won their freedom under the First Step Act.

And Larry Hoover, co-founder and former chairman of the Gangster Disciples, has a hearing set for next month on whether he’ll get a break on his life sentence. 

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