Snared from p 20 not for that chance encounter with Elcock back in 2015. Ultimately, the judge did not even instruct the jury on entrapment. The trial lasted a little over a week. The verdict came down on the Monday after Thanksgiving. An inevitable parade of 12 jurors read off a guilty verdict on each count. It was, Bouhdida said, like “watching my fate through a glass.” The Punishment The 16 years and three months that Bouhdida received was not, in fact, the worst sentence allowed by Arizona law. As a court commissioner explained to him at one April 2016 hearing, technically, Bouhdida could have received a 100-year sentence for the crime, had a judge decided to give him 20 years for each sale and stacked them. “I don’t think that’s likely,” the commissioner hastened to say. Instead, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Richard Nothwehr gave Bouhdida 11 years and three months for the sales, which ran concurrently, plus an addi- tional five years because he was on proba- tion at the time. It was, more or less, what the judge was directed to do by Arizona’s sentencing laws, given that Bouhdida — because he had three serious felonies on his record from the 2009 case — was in the highest category of “re-offenders.” “People are just in disbelief when they get to these points in the system, and the judge’s hands are tied,” Gipson-McLean said of such sentences. “This is the box they operate in.” Still, for marijuana — even for mari- juana — it was a harsh punishment. In 2016, the same year Bouhdida was arrested, a woman who was discovered with 374 pounds of marijuana received a two-year prison sentence. A year earlier, two men who arranged to buy 1,000 pounds of marijuana from an undercover cop each received three and a half years. For Gipson-Mclean, Bouhdida’s case is a relic of an older era in Maricopa County. Under former Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who is now a state supreme court justice, prosecutors offered harsh plea deals and dealt with thousands of marijuana cases a year. In 2016, the year that Bouhdida was arrested, one in six felony cases filed by Maricopa County prosecutors involved marijuana charges. By 2021, after the passage of Proposition 207, that number of pot charges filed had dropped from a few thousand to just a few dozen. Randal McDonald, an attorney at Arizona State University’s post-conviction clinic at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, has been working for the past year on relief for these old marijuana cases. “For the most part,” McDonald said, “even in the 1990s, you were not going to get 15 to 20 years for selling marijuana.” The “outrageous” sentences, he said, do still exist. When cannabis was legalized in Arizona, Proposition 207 allowed for expungement, in which people convicted of low-level marijuana crimes could get their records wiped clean. Per the statute, such crimes include possession and trans- port, if they involved less than 2.5 ounces of pot. Cases of sales of small amounts of marijuana were not discussed in the law. Although it is legal now to transfer up to an ounce of cannabis without monetary gain, unlicensed sales are still prohibited. McDonald’s focus has been on helping people reduce prison sentences that were extended due to a prior marijuana charge. He’s following the court battles playing out around Proposition 207, which could ulti- mately decide if people charged with crimes like “possession for sale” or “trans- port or sale,” should, too, be eligible for expungement. Speaking generally about cases involving low-level sales, McDonald said, “I would say that it’s not clearly outside of 207. I think that it falls in a gray area.” He added, “I will say, I am aware of cases in which the underlying conduct was a person trying to sell marijuana to an undercover cop — and those have been expunged.” But it could depend, he said, on how closely prosecutors were looking at those petitions. Several cases are winding their way through appeals courts that will determine the future of expungements in Arizona. For Bouhdida, it could determine whether he spends the next 10 years of his life locked up. Summer in prison is bleak. At the state prison in Tucson, the swamp coolers have been faulty lately, and for a time in June, the heat was unbearable. Bouhdida spent some days trying to get it fixed. “Part of me wants to point out every dysfunction and inhumanity that this place has. And I used to,” he wrote to New Times. “But I’ve learned to pick my battles.” Lately, in fact, Bouhdida has been feeling optimistic. In June, he celebrated his 29th birthday. Some of his friends in prison made him enchiladas to celebrate. He works, now, as a GED tutor, teaching classes to men in prison who are studying for the degree. Some of these students passed the test recently, and despite his nerves around public speaking, Bouhdida gave a short speech at the celebration. “I encouraged them to continue seeking knowledge,” he said, “and reminded them that their past does not have to define who they are and who they are working to become.” When Bouhdida gets out of prison, he said, he wants to go to the ocean. He has never seen it. He wants to reunite with his family and his son, who is now nearing seven years old. “It affects everybody,” Stewart, Bouhdida’s aunt, said of the impact of the case on their family. Bouhdida’s older brother was still “very hurt,” she said. Now, Bouhdida’s young son, like Bouhdida himself, is growing up without his father. “The extra stress, financial drain, and confusion tore my family apart,” Bouhdida said. “He is the only victim in this case.” 23 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES AUG 4TH–AUG 10TH, 2022
