KANSAN WINS HIS LIFE BACK WITH PARDON (Front page story in Wichita Eagle on Peter Ninemire’s personal transformation in prison shortly after his release via a commutation of sentence by former President, Bill Clinton.)
ALAN BJERGA, The Wichita Eagle
PeterNinemire didn't give a dime to the Clinton campaign.
He didn't use political connections to gain his last-minute pardon during the former president's last day in office. The man federal agents called "one of Kansas' biggest marijuana traffickers" got his pardon the hard way, by serving 10 years for a drug conviction and turning his life around.
Maybe because he wasn't a celebrity, or maybe because many involved in his case supported him - the judge who sentenced him wrote a letter to Clinton on his behalf - his name was lost in the furor over Clinton's long pardon list.
But he doesn't mind the lack of fame. He's living in Salina, adjusting to a new life after 10 years behind bars. The 46-year-old Kansas native admits he has made serious mistakes in his life, and he has been punished for those mistakes. But he now has an unexpected second chance, and he says he won't take it for granted."I can give back," he said. "I deserved to be punished, but I'm starting over." 'A quick buck'
Speaking from his cell phone, Ninemire is worried about using up his minutes. "I just got it a couple months ago," he said. "They said they'd give all these free minutes, but those local calls add up. I guess I learn everything the hard way." Ninemire first used a cell phone last month. He has been in prison since 1991.
His run-ins with the law began in 1981, when he was sentenced to 3 years' probation for growing marijuana with intent to sell near Hays. Another marijuana arrest came in 1986. A third followed in 1989. "I was out to make a quick buck," Ninemire said later. "When I was down, I thought, 'Well, I could sell dope.' "
Ninemire never served jail time for the first two arrests. But as a repeat offender, Ninemire faced a minimum of 24 years in prison for the third. He didn't intend to serve any of them. Ninemire disappeared before sentencing.
Federal agents found him in Florida in 1991. Later that year, Ninemire finally received his sentence: 241/2 years for the '89 charge, 21/2 for fleeing and 4 to 10 for the '86 charge, which Ninemire was appealing when he fled. No parole.
The first time Ninemire set foot in prison, he knew he wouldn't get out until at least 2022. "Here I was, I'd never been in prison, and I had at least 30 years," he said. His first stop was in Leavenworth. "I was in D Block, and the guy in the cell next to me hung himself. That was my initiation," he said.
Mandatory minimums
Ninemire was convicted under federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug offenders, laws meant to remedy inconsistent sentencing. Most mandatory minimum laws at the federal and state levels, including Kansas', date to the 1980s, when tales of wildly varying sentences for similar offenses - depending on who was judging the case - were common.
Along with ensuring consistency, mandatory minimums are intended to deter crime. "It keeps offenders off the streets," said Mike O'Neal, state representative from Hutchinson and chairman of the Kansas House Judiciary Committee. "You do the crime, you do the time. You don't weasel out of it," he said.
The laws are popular with voters, O'Neal said. "The state of Kansas is particularly strong on drug offenders."
But the laws also limit judges' discretion to handle offenders on a case-by-case basis. Topeka federal Judge Richard Rogers sentenced Ninemire in 1991. The sentence seemed harsh to Rogers - the punishment seemed out of line with what a violent criminal would get, for example. But there wasn't much he could do about it."I always regretted that sentence," said Rogers, a federal judge for 25 years. "But I had very little control.
"I always kept in touch with what happened to him after that."
Taking responsibility
While Rogers kept in touch with the case, Ninemire found himself with decades of time to think.
"I did some really deep soul-searching," Ninemire said. From Leavenworth he was transferred to Englewood Federal Prison in Colorado. Eventually, Ninemire said, he came to grips with what he'd done. "It was greed. Greed and self-centeredness," he said. "I tried to take shortcuts, and look where I ended up."
His attitude toward his past and his life began to change, he said, when he learned to take responsibility for who he was and what he had done. "I knew that prison was where I'd be for the majority of the rest of my life," he said. "Just because I was inside the fence, that didn't mean I couldn't live a fulfilling life."
In 1995, Ninemire started the Jericho Road Youth Counseling program in Englewood, which matched at-risk youth with inmates. The idea was to guide youth away from making the same mistakes the prisoners made. He also began teaching counseling and stop-smoking classes in prison. Finally, he organized an inmates chapter of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, an organization trying to repeal those laws.
Ninemire also unsuccessfully tried to get his sentence reduced. Last summer, at a friend's urging, he decided to try for a presidential pardon -"and I have no affiliation with President Clinton or his campaigns," he added, laughing.
He enlisted his lawyer, Marilyn Trubey, and Judge Rogers in support.Rogers said he'd never supported a pardon in his 25 years on the bench. "I'm not a political figure," he said. "I wouldn't have written it if it hadn't been for the length of the sentence."
Presidential pardons are meant for situations like Ninemire's, in which the justice system has mandated a punishment that isn't appropriate to an individual, Rogers said. In Ninemire's case, he said, prison clearly helped reform an individual - society will benefit more from having Ninemire out of jail than from continuing to support him behind bars. "You won't see him in prison again," Rogers said.
On Jan. 20, about 15 minutes before his presidency ended at noon, Clinton officially ended Ninemire's sentence. Ninemire left Englewood that afternoon - a changed man, he says. "I know one thing for sure. I'll never be involved with drugs again."
'The luckiest man'
In Salina, Ninemire is beginning work at a youth home. He has lost 10 years in everyday society, but he has one big advantage as he comes back - his family. His brother is a priest at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Salina, and he has a strong support network nearby.
He's hoping to coordinate Jericho Road-type programs in the Kansas Department of Corrections, using ties to nonprofit organizations to help get grants and fund a program. "What I'm trying to do," he said, "is take people's bad decisions and trying to help kids avoid those decisions."
He's also going to Washington next weekend to protest sentencing laws with Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
"I left behind a bunch of other guys deserving what happened to me, and they are dying for a chance to give back and be productive," he said. Ninemire said he knows that, as a former felon, he has a lot to prove to people. "I challenge them to look at what I do," he said.
"I feel like the luckiest man on the planet," he said. "I got 20 years of my life back. You can't compare anything to that."
Reach Alan Bjerga at 269-6763 .
Wichita Eagle, The (KS)
2001-03-25
Section: MAIN NEWS
Edition: main
Page: 1A
This was article that President Clinton referenced when Peter was able to thank him for granting him a presidential commutation of sentence before he left office after he gave the inaugural address to open the Bob Dole Center of Political Science at KU.
Reformed drug dealer wants to thank Clinton / LJWorld.com
One huge success
Peter Ninemire didn't belong in prison anymore. The president did the right thing in releasing him.
Call came just in time for Kansan
Posted: Sunday, January 28, 2001
By By STEVE FRY
The Capital-Journal
Time was growing short for Peter Ninemire on the morning President Clinton was leaving office.
Ninemire, a Kansan serving a 27-year federal prison term for convictions that included growing marijuana, had sought executive clemency for release from prison.
Fifteen minutes before Clinton left office at noon Jan. 20, Ninemire got word that the president had commuted his sentence. Ninety minutes later, he was a free man for the first time in more than 10 years.
According to the federal judge and federal public defender who urged Clinton to release him, Ninemire's rehabilitation is real and complete.
"The transformation is so genuine. He's going to do great. We will be reading about him in the future, and it will be in a very positive context," said Marilyn Trubey, the assistant federal public defender who defended him in U.S. District Court on a marijuana-growing charge, twice represented him in federal appeals court and appealed a marijuana-growing conviction to the Kansas Supreme Court.
Shortly after Clinton commuted his sentence to time served, Ninemire, 45, walked out of the Englewood Federal Correctional Institution, a medium-security facility near Denver, and a relative drove him to a family home. The next day, Ninemire was in Salina, where he is living with family and friends.
Ninemire is reluctant to talk to the media so soon out of prison, Trubey said.
His emergence from incarceration to freedom "was just such an overwhelming experience. It's just sheer exhilaration," Trubey said.
Ninemire, a former disc jockey who grew up near Norton in northwest Kansas, had two drug convictions in Kansas for growing marijuana. In 1989, he was convicted of growing 600 marijuana plants and was sentenced to 24 years and four months in prison. He also was sentenced to two years and six months for failing to show up for his sentencing.
Ninemire served 10 years in federal prison and faced 14 more even if he earned good-time credit, Trubey said. In a letter to Clinton, Trubey said Ninemire had focused on others rather than himself.
"Peter has so much to offer society that cannot be achieved while he is incarcerated," she wrote. "I know you receive numerous applications. However, no one is more deserving than Peter Ninemire."
U.S. District Judge Richard Rogers, who had sentenced Ninemire, recommended his release because of "his marvelous rehabilitation." Rogers thought Ninemire's sentence, which was based on federal law, was too harsh but the judge had no choice.
Rogers had doubted anything would come of his efforts on Ninemire's behalf, and Trubey thought her client's chances of release were one in 10. But on Jan. 20, radio news said Clinton had signed some acts of clemency, and Trubey learned Ninemire had been freed when he called her from Englewood.
"We both were so excited that we could hardly speak," Trubey said.
Two days later, Ninemire arrived in Topeka to visit Trubey at her office. They then went to see Rogers and Ninemire thanked the judge for writing his letter.
"It was such a happy time," said Trubey, who went "from the despair of seeing a client get 27 years for growing marijuana to the ecstasy of seeing him released after 10 years."
His case was the only time in her 13-year career that she sought clemency for a client.
Trubey said she wrote the letter seeking clemency "because he is so exceptional."
Ninemire, who used his sentence as an opportunity to change, never blamed others for his predicament, unlike many prisoners, she said. He became a Buddhist and realized that until he accepted responsibility, change wasn't going to happen.
"Peter learned that peace and contentment come from within, not from external circumstances," she said.
In prison, he helped found an NAACP chapter; served as president of the Rocky Mountain Club, which sponsors activities for inmates and their families and acts as a liaison between inmates and the prison administration; and started a Toastmasters group for public speaking.
Ninemire is proudest of helping to found the Jericho Road Youth Counseling Program to aid juvenile defendants and their families, she said.
Peter has a "voice of credibility" with youths because he has been there and done that, she said. "He's emerged from the other side. His life has completely changed in the last 10 years."
Ninemire trains other inmate counselors, and Jericho Road has been recognized by law enforcement officers and juvenile judges as the most effective youth counseling program in the Denver area, Trubey said.
Said Judge Rogers: "I'm convinced he'll never be in trouble again. I'm convinced he'll be a valuable aid in the community. It was almost a miracle."
Steve Fry can be reached at (785) 295-1206 or .
Kansas man grateful for Clinton's action
Ex-con free to help others
Wichita man whose sentence was commuted now counsels youths, people with addictions
Ex-con free to help others
Wichita man whose sentence was commuted now counsels youths, people with addictions
Posted: Thursday, February 27, 2003
By By Steve Fry
The Capital-Journal
Peter Ninemire radiated with the thrill of being a free man after President Clinton commuted his federal prison sentence in 2001. Photos
The thrill Ninemire felt then hasn't left him.
"I remain as grateful as the day I left prison. Every day I wake up, I touch myself and (I) can't believe I'm here," said Ninemire, who was freed on Jan. 20, 2001, the last day of Clinton's administration.
Today he is in college, has an infant daughter and girlfriend, and has goals to work with troubled youths.
Ninemire had two earlier drug convictions in Kansas for growing marijuana when he was convicted in 1989 of growing 600 marijuana plants and was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison. When freed, Ninemire had served 10 years and faced at least 14 more, with credit for good behavior.
Soon after his release, he attended a Families Against Mandatory Minimums workshop in Washington, D.C., then visited with the deputy director of the federal Bureau of Prisons to talk about implementing Jericho Road, a youth counseling program he helped develop in prison to aid at-risk kids, as a model in Bureau of Prisons facilities.
As he walked out of the BOP building after that meeting, he saw the Capitol.
"It was all so surreal," he said.
Ninemire lives in Wichita and is attending Butler County Community College, where he has a 4.0 grade point average and has completed 40 hours of school. He also works 40 to 50 hours a week at three part-time jobs. His educational goal is to get a master's degree in sociology from Wichita State University.
He works for FAMM as a trainer-organizer, giving workshops in Wichita, Kansas City and Milwaukee. FAMM is seeking to reform sentencing laws and wants judges to have more discretion in sentencing offenders. In Kansas and U.S. District Courts, many sentences are determined by a grid, which takes into account the defendant's criminal history and the severity of the current conviction. Judges often have little discretion in determining the length of a sentence.
Ninemire tries to mobilize FAMM members to be citizen lobbyists and to raise public awareness of what he says are the disproportionate sentences given to defendants, especially drug offenders, due to mandatory minimum sentencing. Prisoners coming out of incarceration need support in housing and employment to re-connect them to the community -- otherwise they'll return to what's familiar and eventually prison, Ninemire said.
Ninemire also is supporting a bill in the Legislature requiring mandatory treatment for people convicted of low-level drug possession rather than incarceration. The cost of treatment is $3,200 to $6,500 for drug addiction, compared to $15,00 to $25,000 a year for prison, he said.
Using his recently acquired Kansas drug and alcohol counselor's certificate, Ninemire also is conducting group counseling three nights a week, three hours a night with at-risk youths, most with drug addictions, who are 14 to 17 years old and who have been referred by judges. At the Adolescent Adult Family Recovery unit in Wichita, Ninemire educates them about substance abuse, addictions and breaking the cycle.
Ninemire, who smoked for 25 years before he quit, works at a third job to teach people to quit smoking.
His ultimate goal is to develop a youth counseling program similar to the Jericho Road youth counseling program that he helped develop when he was in prison. He wants to get the program into prisons to help youths and the prisoners.
Ninemire said he wants to keep kids from making some of the "terrible decisions that devastated my life. We're the sole creators of our own sufferings."
Ninemire said it is rewarding to watch a kid who is resistant to change, who has addictive beliefs and whose life is centered on drugs, make the necessary changes so they can communicate with their parents, set goals and focus on school.