A man sentenced to 5 life terms is released after nearly 30 years

NEW YORK (AP) — A Brooklyn man who served 27 years in prison for robbery and drug charges has been granted early release by the same federal judge who sentenced him to five life terms behind bars, a penalty the judge now says was overly harsh.

Walter Johnson, who once went by the street name “King Tut” and had been questioned in connection with the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur outside a Manhattan recording studio, was released from Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville in upstate New York on Thursday following an order from U.S. District Judge Frederic Block.

Johnson, now 61, said he intends to live with his family in Brooklyn and give back to his community by “mentoring young men to steer clear" of the choices he made, according to Mia Eisner-Grynberg, deputy attorney-in-charge of Federal Defenders of New York, which represented him.

“We are grateful for the humanity and the humility that Judge Block exercised in reconsidering Mr. Johnson’s life sentence,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “Mr. Johnson’s extraordinary rehabilitation in the face of a death-in-prison sentence is a testament to his character and reflects his growth and change.”

Block, in his 26-page ruling, cited changing judicial standards for his decision to reduce Johnson’s sentence to time served, plus three years of supervised release.

He said the 2018 First Step Act, which overhauled the federal sentencing process, allowed judges to reconsider prior sentences and prisoners to seek early release.

“I now believe that my sentences, though lawfully rendered, were excessively harsh,” Block wrote. “Just like prisoners who have evolved into better human beings during their lengthy periods of incarceration, judges also evolve with the passage of years on the bench.”

Federal prosecutors, in opposing Johnson’s sentence reduction, detailed the violent robberies that he and others had been arrested in connection with between 1995 and 1996.

“Nothing about the defendant’s current circumstances or time in prison support a sentence reduction given the heinous nature of these crimes,” they wrote in a letter to the judge in April.

But one of the main victims in those crimes, who prosecutors said Johnson robbed multiple times and raped and sodomized while bound, was among those who supported Johnson’s release.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace’s office declined to comment Friday.

Eisner-Grynberg said Johnson was the only person ever sentenced to mandatory life in prison out of the Eastern District of New York, a federal jurisdiction that covers Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, under the so-called Three Strikes law.

That federal statute, which was relatively new when Johnson was sentenced, calls for mandatory life sentences for persons convicted of felonies who have been previously convicted of a violent or serious felony.

Eisner-Grynberg argued in court filings that Johnson’s sentence would never have been imposed under current judicial standards. She also cited his rehabilitation while behind bars, which included no disciplinary infractions, helping found various programs for prisoners and commendations from prison officials for his positive leadership.

Johnson, in a March letter to Block seeking early release, said his time behind bars has been “bittersweet,” leaving him “fundamentally changed” from the person who had a criminal history stretching back to 1977, when he was just a 14-year-old-teen growing up in the East New York section of Brooklyn.

“This sentence has given me an opportunity to do a great deal of introspection and to reinvent myself,” he wrote in the four-page letter. “I now take responsibility for the pain that I caused in society when I was ignorant, reckless and selfish.”

Johnson closed by noting that Nelson Mandela had served 27 years in prison in South Africa -- the same length of time he’d been incarcerated.

“Please give me a chance to lead a life of peace and joy and giving back, like Nelson Mandela did,” he wrote.

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Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.