BREAKING NEWS: President Trump commuted Alice Marie Johnson’s sentence after Kim Kardashian meeting
President Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson.
The 63-year old grandmother has already served 21 years of a life sentence after being convicted on charges of conspiracy to possess cocaine and attempted possession of cocaine. Johnson, a first-time non-violent drug offender, was pardoned a week after Kim Kardashian pleaded her case with Trump.
Kim Kardashian has recently become passionate about social justice and says she’s planning to change people’s lives one person at a time.
Last Wednesday Kardashian found herself in the midst of a media storm as reports circulated that she was meeting with President Trump at the White House to discuss prison reform.
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And the reality star was campaigning for the release of one prisoner in particular:Â Alice Marie Johnson.
Johnson got mixed up in drug trafficking following a particularly rough period in her life. She lost her job at FedEx where she had worked for 10 years (due to a gambling addiction), got divorced, and then her youngest son died in a motorcycle accident.
This traumatic series of events is what led her to become involved with drugs.
As she told Mic: “I felt like a failure… I went into a complete panic and out of desperation, I made one of the worst decisions of my life to make some quick money. I became involved in a drug conspiracy.”
One of the most stunning things about this case is that even though her 1993 arrest was her first offense she was given a life sentence without the chance of parole.
Johnson was convicted in 1996 on eight criminal counts stemming from a Memphis-based cocaine trafficking operation involving more than a dozen people.
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Ten of her co-defendants testified against her during her trial in exchange for a reduced or dropped charges. For some reason Johnson was never offered the same plea deal and she was sentenced to life in prison in 1997.
