MOM FACING LIFE FOR FIRST DRUG OFFENSE WILL GO FREE

Birmingham --- A woman who became a poster child for critics of mandatory
sentencing was granted freedom Wednesday after once being sentenced to life
without parole for a first-time drug offense.

Theresa Wilson cried and was allowed to hug her husband and two children
after a judge reduced her sentence to time served.

"You've gotten a second chance. Don't blow it," Circuit Judge Tommy Nail
told Wilson.

Now 34, Wilson was sentenced in 1998 to spend the rest of her life in
prison because of a law that branded her a "drug baron" for selling a
morphine mixture for $150. The 1986 law mandated life because the mixture
weighed more than 56 grams.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals last year ruled 3-2 that the life
sentence for a first drug offense was cruel and unusual punishment, sending
the case to Nail for a new sentence.

Wilson will be on probation for three years. She remained in custody
temporarily after resentencing, awaiting paperwork for her release.

"May God have mercy on me," she told the judge.

She has said she is not the same woman who was arrested in 1996 for selling
the drug to an undercover police officer.

"The Theresa in 1996 was a drug addict who didn't care," Wilson told The
Birmingham News in an interview last month.

"My mother had passed away, and when she left, a part of me died," she said.

She was convicted in March 1998 and given the life sentence by now-retired
Circuit Judge J. Richmond Pearson.

"Judge Pearson only did what he had to do. He sat up there with tears in
his eyes," she said. "I was never angry. Just disappointed in the justice
system."

She went to state prison in May 1998, working in its clothing factory and
obtaining her GED. She was reunited with her family, and her husband and
children visited every two weeks.

Wilson said she plans to work as a church secretary and eventually wants to
become a drug recovery counselor.