On a June morning in 2004, 17-year-old Mitchell Lawrence rode his bicycle from his home in Otis to Great Barrington, where he met up with friends in a parking lot outside a movie theater. Lawrence, who would start his senior year in high school that fall, went to the parking lot several times a week, where a group of teens regularly met up to pass the time, playing hackey sack and smoking pot.
A few weeks earlier, a new person had begun joining the group. Mitchell knew the new guy as “José”; what he didn’t know was that José was an undercover detective, working as part of a wide-scale Berkshire County drug task force operation that eventually would yield 19 drug-related arrests—and generate a considerable amount of controversy. Among the controversial issues: whether prosecutors were too eager to apply the school drug zone law, under which some defendants, including Lawrence, faced much more stringent penalties than they would have received had they simply been convicted for the underlying offense.
That day in the parking lot, Lawrence got high with some friends, then chatted with José for about an hour, according to court records. José asked Lawrence “if [he] had any smoke,” which the teenager later said he interpreted as an invitation to smoke together.
Lawrence agreed, although he was confused, he later said in court, when José led him not to the area behind the theater where the kids typically smoked, but in the opposite direction, near a Congregational church. He was also confused, he said, when José handed him a $20 bill, since he thought the two were simply going to share his pot.
Lawrence took the money and went off to buy a burrito. Two and a half months later, he was arrested. In 2006, Lawrence was convicted by a jury of possession and distribution of a class D substance. A first-time offender with a relatively small amount of pot, Lawrence did not face lengthy jail time for those convictions; Judge John A. Agostini sentenced the teen to just one day for the distribution charge, and 10 days for possession.
Unfortunately for Lawrence, however, he was also convicted of committing a drug offense within a “school zone” (triggered by the fact that a preschool was located within the Congregational church), which earned him an automatic minimum sentence of two years in the Berkshire House of Correction.
Lawrence appealed his conviction but did not prevail. But while the appeals court upheld the conviction, at least one justice took the opportunity to question the logic behind the “school-zone” law that landed Lawrence, a first-time offender arrested for a $20 pot sale, behind bars for two years.
In an opinion attached to the case, Justice Frederick Brown wrote that Detective Felix Aguirre—the real name of the man known as “José” to Lawrence and his friends in the parking lot—had known from his weeks of observation where the kids typically went to smoke, and had deliberately led Lawrence to another site, within a designated school zone.
“I believe that an enlightened prosecutor should not have sought a conviction for the school zone offense,” Brown wrote. “A government official (i.e., police officer) induced the defendant to enter a danger zone that exposed him to an enhanced penalty. This conduct is particularly outrageous because the young man went along with an experienced police officer, who undoubtedly was aware of the consequences of drug activities in a school zone.”
Brown continued: “This case is made all the more troubling by the fact that because of the government’s actions, a teenage defendant with no known involvement in drug sales other than this isolated incident, and for whom there is no indication of drug use other than marijuana, was subjected to a greatly enhanced penalty, including incarceration for two years, due to his conviction under [the school-zone law].”
The Great Barrington drug busts set off a furor of controversy in Berkshire County, in part because of the prosecutors’ use of the school-zone law. Of the 19 people arrested as part of the operation, seven, including Lawrence, had no prior records and were arrested for selling small amounts of drugs, according to reporting in the Berkshire Eagle at the time.
Berkshire District Attorney David Capeless, who has built a reputation as a tough-on-drugs prosecutor, has maintained the investigation was a valid response to public concerns about drug dealing in the area, including specific complaints about the Great Barrington parking lot where Lawrence was arrested.
During the trial, Capeless maintained that Lawrence was not arrested over a single cigarette, but, in fact, had more than a gram of marijuana prepackaged for sale. Lawrence went to jail “due to some poor decisions on his part,” Capeless told the Eagle.
