Life w/o parole for 2.4 lbs. of weed + 104 years for 30g of cocaine: welcome to Alabama

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Known now for the rest of his life as Alabama state inmate #298448, Bolden has repeatedly been in trouble with the law, but there is no violence on his rap sheet.

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Bolden was arrested in Dothan in August of 2011, and the charge was automatically upgraded from possession to trafficking because he was found to have possessed 2.4 pounds of marijuana, though prosecutors did not prove that he actually sold the drug.

If police had found less than 2.2 pounds - approximately one kilogram - of pot, it would have been considered a possession charge, for which he would have gotten no more than 10 years in prison under Alabama sentencing guidelines.

Instead, he was sentenced on Feb. 17, 2015, to life in prison for trafficking marijuana.

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Bolden was also found to be in possession of 30 grams of cocaine - enough to be considered a "trafficking weight" of the drug. But that was handled as a separate case for which he received a separate sentence of 104 years for cocaine trafficking

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Maria Morris, senior supervising staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, says a key component of the system that sentences nonviolent offenders like Bolden to life in prison is the fact that Alabama has one of the most aggressive approaches to marijuana offenders of any state in the nation.

"Alabama has very harsh sentencing, especially if you've got any priors, and we see it with a lot of low-level offenses ratcheting up with repetition," she told AL.com in an interview.

"One thing we have in Alabama is a very low threshold for when something becomes a felony. Marijuana possession is one of them. You're looking at something the rest of the country has decided we don't want to throw people away for, and that's what we are doing in Alabama."

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In April 2016, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore - who has since been suspended from the court - spoke out against Alabama's marijuana sentencing regime in a special opinion.

Moore wrote the opinion after he concurred with his court's ruling denying Houston County man Carroll Brooker a review of the case that put him behind bars for life without parole for marijuana trafficking. Because he had prior felony convictions, the courts were required under state law to issue the sentence after Brooker - who is now 77 years old - was caught with 2.8 pounds of marijuana in 2011.

"In my view, Brooker's sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a non-violent, drug-related crime reveals grave flaws in our statutory sentencing scheme," wrote Moore, who described Brooker's sentence as "excessive and unjustified."

"I urge the legislature to revisit that statutory sentencing scheme to determine whether it serves an appropriate purpose."

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