This ‘peacenik Deadhead’ was set to die behind bars — until Obama granted him clemency

Timothy
Tyler was just 25 years old when he was
sentenced.

Free
Timothy Tyler

Timothy Tyler has spent more than 20 years of his life in federal
prison for selling
LSD to a police informant.

And there was a decent chance he would have died there, until
President Obama on Tuesday granted sentence commutations to Tyler

and 110 other nonviolent drug offenders in federal custody.

Tyler — a Grateful Dead fan with a history of mental
illness — was sentenced to life in prison for his
nonviolent drug offense. Because there’s no
federal parole, Tyler had to get Obama himself to sign off on
his early release.

Last June, the Innocence Project
Clinic & Clemency Project at the Catholic University of
America’s law school filed a petition for commutation on
his behalf, giving him a shot at liberty in his
lifetime.

Sandy Ogilvy, the professor who runs the project, broke the news
to Tyler by phone on Tuesday. Tyler’s reaction seemed subdued, at
first — likely because the call was done over speakerphone in
front of prison officials, Ogilvy said.

“I’ll probably break down later, but thank you very much,” Tyler
said, according to Ogilvy.

His release is scheduled for August 30, 2018, on condition that
he complete a nine-month residential drug treatment program,
Ogilvy said.

Tyler’s case had first been brought to the project’s attention by
a group called Families against
Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), which works to reform the
kind of extreme sentencing laws that landed Tyler behind
bars for life.

"Tim Tyler’s case has bothered me for two decades. I’ve been
doing this since 1991," Julie Stewart, the president of FAMM,
told Business Insider last year. "His case bothered me because
he’s such a peacenik."

"We put this peacenik deadhead in prison for the rest of his
life," she added, "and to me, it just shows how off-the-charts
crazy we became about drug sentencing in the ’80s and ’90s."

‘Three strikes and you’re out’  

Congress enacted mandatory
minimum sentencing laws in response to the 1980s
crack epidemic, and many states followed suit with similar laws.

These so-called "three strikes and you’re out" laws force judges
to impose strict sentences based on the amount of drugs sold and
number of previous convictions — without regard for mitigating
factors like drug addiction, mental illness, and abuse.

Tyler, whom
we first profiled in July 2013, has reported having
a history of psychosis and drug addiction, according to a
pre-sentence memorandum. He was also terrorized as a child by his
stepfather, his mother and sister previously told Business
Insider.

As
a teenager, Timothy Tyler found a community among Grateful Dead
fans.

Free
Timothy Tyler

When he was about 17, Tyler went to his first Dead show and
attached himself to the loving hippies he met there, his sister,
Carrie Tyler-Stoafer, said.

One of the people he met at a Grateful Dead show gave
him LSD for free, Tyler-Stoafer said.

Tyler ended up selling the drug to his friends for less than
a dollar a hit, he previously said.

He was arrested twice for drug offenses, though he received
probation both times. Then he got arrested a third time after
selling larger quantities of the drug to a friend who turned out
to be an informant.

To be clear, Tyler got busted for selling a lot of acid — 13,045
hits, according to a pre-sentence memorandum.

But that memo doesn’t make him and the men with whom he was
busted look like career criminals, either. Tyler only netted
about $3,000 from "a very loosely woven conspiracy" that involved
selling acid to "friends, family and business acquaintances,"
according to the memo prepared by his probation officer.

"I wouldn’t do it again," Tyler told Business Insider on the
phone from the federal prison
in Waymart, Pennsylvania, back in 2013, when we first
reported on his case. "I wouldn’t have done it if I had
known I could have gotten this kind of time.”

Ogilvy said the president’s decision to grant Tyler clemency
wasn’t entirely unexpected — Ogilvy believed Tyler had an
exceptionally strong case from the beginning. The petition for
Tyler’s commutation hinged upon the argument that were he being
sentenced today, he would likely have received a maximum of 10
years — a far cry from the life sentence imposed on him in 1994,
when he was just 24.

“There’s no reason that Tim should have ever been facing a
sentence like this,” Ogilvy said. “A 10-year-sentence would have
been harsh, but reasonable. A life sentence was totally
unreasonable."

A major shift in America’s drug policy

A few weeks after Business Insider first reported on Tyler’s case
in 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced
a major shift in America’s policy of putting
nonviolent criminals away for decades.

Though Holder didn’t have the power to do away with
mandatory minimums — only Congress can change that law —
he instituted a policy that dramatically reduces their
effect.

Timothy
Tyler is in life in prison without the possibility of
parole.

Facebook/Timothy
Tyler

Under Holder’s new guidelines, federal prosecutors
don’t charge defendants with dealing a specific amount of
drugs if those defendants have committed "low-level, nonviolent
drug offenses" and aren’t a part of large organizations, gangs,
or drug cartels.

This means judges won’t be forced to mete out harsh sentences for
many nonviolent offenders.

Though this new policy wouldn’t affect people like Tyler who
had already been sentenced, Holder’s announcement gave Tyler
renewed hope that his more than 20-year-long stint in prison
would actually end.

"At one point, I couldn’t see myself becoming free," Tyler told
Business Insider from prison. "The tide might be changing.
My mother used to say she didn’t have a child [for him] to spend
[his] whole life in prison."

Tyler was right about the changing tide.

In April 2014, the Justice Department announced
a new clemency initiative to prioritize applications
from people who would have been gotten much shorter sentences if
they were convicted today, among other criteria. Overall
attitudes on mandatory minimums have been shifting, too.

Ogilvy called the clemency initiative “wonderful,” but said it
doesn’t do nearly enough to address the overwhelming amount of
people in federal custody with overly harsh sentences.

“Even if [Obama] does 100 commutations a month until he leaves
office in January, 2017, he’s only going to scratch the surface,”
he said.

“What’s really going to have to take place is for Congress to
finally get it together and enact real sentencing reform that
gets rid of some of the harsh sentences that we have on the books
now."

After Tyler’s release

Timothy
Tyler has already spent more than two decades in
prison.

Free
Timothy Tyler

Tyler has been planning his future outside prison for quite some
time, Ogilvy said. His sister has invited him to live with her
and her husband in Reno, Nevada, until he finds his footing, and
has even offered him employment at her business.

Tyler knew even from his Deadhead days that he had a passion for
food and cooking — he used to earn a living making fried dough
while he following the Grateful Dead on tour. He hopes to
potentially expand his sister’s business to open a small
restaurant or offer catering services, Ogilvy said.

"He’s got some realistic plans, and he’s got a wonderful support
network in his mother and his sister. So I’m confident he’s going
to do well once he’s released," he said.

As for the future of federal sentencing, criminal justice reform
advocates are holding out hope that congressional action will
replace the need for presidential commutations.

"There’s lots of people that are not going to be reached by the
president. And who knows what the next president is going to do?"
Ogilvy said.

More than 30,000 federal inmates submitted applications for
assistance in clemency petitions, and just 1,600 have been filed
to the Office of the Pardon Attorney as of August, The
Atlantic reported.

"I think they are overwhelmed," Julie Stewart of FAMM told
Business Insider last year. "They do not have enough staff to go
through the thousands of cases they have."