Read the full project, Meth: The Prison Pipeline, here:
Jose Milton Puentes and Michael Bowling committed similar crimes.
Both mailed roughly a pound of methamphetamine across state lines — a federal offense. Both were caught. Both pleaded guilty.
Puentes, now 43, was a first-time offender who cooperated with federal agents. Bowling, 50, had prior federal convictions for selling drugs and conspiring to smuggle immigrants.
Given those differences, one might expect their sentences would be vastly different. And they were. One received 7.5 years; the other received 30 years.
But here’s the twist. Puentes — the first-time offender — received the 30 years.
His sentence, along with hundreds of others that The Dallas Morning News examined, illustrates what many view as a grave injustice in the legal system — one largely the result of one main factor: location.
Bowling mailed his meth packages to various addresses in New Hampshire. Puentes mailed his meth to Fort Worth.
The News combed through 10 years of meth sentences handed down by federal district judges — and nowhere are those sentences as harsh as the Northern District of Texas, our yearslong investigation found. Meth sentences here are often stiffer than those imposed on rapists and other violent criminals. They are also far more severe than sentences for other, more deadlier drugs such as fentanyl.
The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, which is the fourth largest in the nation,handles the third-highest volume of meth cases in the nation, behind the Southern District of California and the Western District of Texas. As such, the long sentences pushed by prosecutors and determined by federal judges in North Texas play an outsized role in fueling a prison pipeline that, based on Bureau of Prisons data, is costing U.S. taxpayers roughly $1.4 billion a year just to house meth offenders. Meth is not only the most common illegal narcotic in the U.S., it’s the single-biggest reason why people are locked up in federal prison today, federal officials acknowledge.
Depending on the allegation and circumstances, meth crimes can be state or federal cases. Federal cases, which often have ties to drug trafficking organizations, not only carry sentences typically more severe than those in state court, but also do not include the possibility of parole or probation. For federal meth prisoners, their best hope for release is presidential clemency. That is extremely rare, though both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have done so for a handful of meth offenders.
For this report, The News reviewed hundreds of federal North Texas meth trafficking cases from October 2013 through September 2023 and interviewed dozens of defense attorneys, former prosecutors, law professors, retired judges, and others who have spent their careers researching and studying criminal justice. The News reached out to about half of the current North Texas federal judges, including the chief judge. All declined to comment, which is typical for sitting judges.
The U.S. Attorney in Dallas and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Dallas also declined to comment for this story.
The News’ investigation revealed the following:
- The median meth sentence in the Northern District of Texas, which includes Dallas, from October 2013 to September 2023 was 124 months, or slightly more than 10 years. The national median sentence during that time was six years.
- When compared with other states on the southern border, the Northern District — as well as the Eastern District of Texas, which includes Collin and Denton counties — are particular outliers. The median sentence in the Southern District of California, which prosecutes the most meth cases, was 2.75 years. The median sentence in the federal district that covers Arizona is also 2.75 years.
- Meth sentencing guidelines are so strict that federal judges across the nation only followed them in 23% of cases in fiscal year 2022, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. But in the Northern District of Texas, judges sentenced defendants within those guidelines in more than 42% of meth cases.
- All but two of the 16 federal judges in the Northern District of Texas handed down higher drug sentences on average than federal judges nationally.
- In the Northern District of Texas, 27% of meth offenders who received sentences longer than 20 years had no criminal record or what judges deemed to be minor criminal histories, federal sentencing data shows.
- About 1,000 people in North Texas, which includes the Northern District of Texas and portions of the Eastern District of Texas, were sentenced to 20 years or more for meth over the past decade. More than 680 of those were from the Northern District.
- The median sentence for meth trafficking in the Northern District of Texas was higher than the median sentence for robbery or assault. Perhaps more telling, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, it was actually three years longer than the average sentence served in state court for rape. Even murderers in state prison often serve less time than some federal meth offenders because of parole, which the federal system does not have.
- The meth sentences set for meth are higher than any other illegal drugs, despite accounting for fewer than half as many overdose deaths as opioids.
“If the goal of the guidelines is to have uniform consistency in sentencing, I would say that is not happening,” said Dallas defense attorney Mick Mickelsen. “You have wide disparities from office to office and court to court.”
Most juries, he said, would never give 20 to 30 years to nonviolent drug offenders.
“The federal judges,” Mickelsen said, “have their own culture about what appropriate sentences are.”
Nancy Gertner, a retired Massachusetts federal judge and a current senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, said judges can eliminate such unfair differences by not over-relying on the meth guidelines as a default, which leads to uniformly harsh sentences.
“The default guideline is always the more punitive one,” she said.
The guidelines, she said, were crafted decades ago when crime was rising and before addiction was properly understood — which is not the case today. Gertner calls it “following a formula and nothing more.” That approach might be more appealing in districts with heavy case loads such as Dallas because it takes less time, she said, and there’s less of a chance of being reversed on appeal.
“Guideline sentencing,” Gertner said, “is unquestionably easier.”
Under the federal judicial system and its sentencing guideline scheme, average sentences for similar crimes — and similar defendants — are not supposed to vary greatly among districts.
“This is allowed to happen because it affects primarily groups we don’t care about as a country,” said Carl Hart, a neuroscientist at Columbia University and professor of psychology, referring to drug users and dealers.
While there is a wide range of average meth sentences across the nation’s 94 federal districts, several have average meth sentences similar to the Northern District of Texas. The Southern District of Iowa, for example, had an average sentence of 122 months — two shorter than the Northern District — and 11 other districts, including the Eastern District of Texas, had an average sentence of 120 months.
The Eastern District of New York, which includes Brooklyn, registered a median meth sentence of two years, the nation’s shortest. Other districts that recorded some of the shortest meth sentences serve Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
But if location creates an inequity in sentencing, another troubling inequity, experts argue, is how meth crimes are prosecuted compared with other drug crimes.
More than twice as many people die from opioids, including fentanyl, than meth. But sentences don’t reflect that.
While the U.S. median sentence for meth is six years, the median for cocaine is five years and for heroin it’s four years. Even fentanyl carries a lower median sentence, at a little over four years.
The district that covers Dallas-Fort Worth is the perfect place to examine both inequities. While the median meth sentence was 10.3 years, the median sentences for cocaine (eight years), fentanyl (seven years) and heroin (5.8 years) were all substantially less.
When defense attorney Gary Smart argued for a lesser sentence for his client, Hector Saldivar, in a 2016 Fort Worth meth case, he took the rare trouble of pointing out how the Northern District of Texas’ outsized drug sentences compare with the rest of the country, using data culled by the Sentencing Commission.
“Judge, we filed a motion for variance quoting numerous statistics to show that the Northern District is significantly out of line with the rest of the other circuits,” Smart told U.S. District Judge John McBryde, according to a sentencing transcript.
McBryde, who died in late 2022, was unimpressed. He gave Saldivar 33 years in prison.
“Maybe,” McBryde responded, “they’re the ones out of line.”
The News’ examination of court documents of hundreds of these cases found example after example in North Texas of nonviolent offenders, first-time offenders and defendants who cooperated with prosecutors and received decadeslong prison terms.
Francisco Gomez Mora was a meth “cook,” or processor, which is a lower-level worker in the meth trade. At the time of his arrest in 2021, Gomez Mora, 52, had no criminal record. He was sentenced to almost 21 years.
Joceline Nicole Parra and a man in March 2020 coordinated the delivery of a little more than 2 pounds of meth to someone in Dallas. She left it in a backpack at a gas station where someone else picked it up. She was 21 at the time and had no criminal record. She pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to almost 22 years in prison.
Mayeli Molina, a Fort Worth mom, was caught on phone taps purchasing a little more than 2 pounds of meth for her uncle, although no drugs were found on her, court records show. It was a single transaction and her first offense. She was convicted at trial and sentenced to 24 years in prison.
“I have said it before, and I will say it again, drug sentences are excessive when you consider some of the other crimes especially when you have a high drug amount,” U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay said in 2022 in Dallas — right before giving a meth dealer 27 years in prison.
A number of factors — some unique to meth laws and some more specific to North Texas — have enabled judges here to impose these disproportionately longer sentences.
Sentencing guidelines
Congress passes laws setting punishments for drug offenses. The Sentencing Commission, an independent agency in the judiciary, then develops sentencing policies and guidelines for federal courts based on those laws.
Congress has not changed the meth laws since the 1980s — except to make them stronger.
As such, meth is now treated more harshly under federal law than any other drug, even though empirical studies show meth is no more toxic or addictive than other hard drugs.
Meth trafficking also has been the most common drug crime prosecuted in federal courts over the past decade. This impact is particularly felt in North Texas, where meth cases dominate court dockets.
There have been and are growing and persistent calls — as recent as this year — for meth law reform from current and retired federal judges, former prosecutors and law professors. Critics contend the meth laws are outdated, unfair, unreasonable and run contrary to scientific and empirical studies showing meth’s toxicity compared to other drugs.
A number of influential organizations and individuals in the federal justice system this year called for changes to the meth laws and guidelines. They include the Federal Judicial Conference of the United States, federal public defenders, federal probation officers, and liberal and conservative criminal justice groups.
Carlton Reeves, chair of the Sentencing Commission, said in a statement to The News that the meth guidelines “may lead to sentences that create unwarranted disparities and fail to adequately reflect culpability.”
“Over the last year, the Sentencing Commission has heard from a chorus of judges, probation officers, nonprofit groups, researchers, and members of the public raising concerns about sentences for meth offenses,” said Reeves, a U.S. district judge in Mississippi. “When people speak to the Commission, they will be heard. For that reason, we will be discussing issues with meth sentencing at an upcoming Commission roundtable on the federal drug guidelines.”
Amid the debate, some federal judges nationwide are taking matters into their own hands, increasingly issuing sentences that are shorter than what the guidelines call for, our analysis found. Those judges disregard elements of the meth guidelines as a policy.
For example, Senior District Judge Terry Means in 2021 in Fort Worth sentenced a meth defendant below the punishment range as part of his standing disagreement with the meth guidelines. He said those guidelines create “harsh and often unreasonable sentences and prompt sentencing disparity between defendants, judges, districts, circuits, and regions.”
Yet case after case that The News reviewed since 2013 show other North Texas judges and prosecutors have taken the opposite stance. They typically justify the harsh sentences by calling meth a deadly poison that ruins lives, according to case records examined by The News.
The News’ analysis shows that while federal judges nationally followed the tough sentencing guidelines in 23% of meth cases over the past decade, judges in the Northern District of Texas sentenced defendants within the guidelines in more than 42% of such cases. Judges in the Eastern District of Texas, which includes Collin County and other northern suburbs, followed the meth sentencing guidelines at a higher rate, in 55% of cases.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman explained during a 2020 sentencing why he sticks to the meth guidelines when sentencing a man who sold crystal meth, known as ice.
“I don’t feel like it’s my role to question the sentencing guidelines determination and the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s determination when it comes to ice,” he said. “At this point I just don’t feel like it’s my duty or my responsibility … to go outside my lane, so to speak.”
In the case of Juan Rodriguez, a 23-year-old with a minor criminal history, the meth sentencing guidelines called for a prison term of between 30 and 40 years.
“Taking young men like Mr. Rodriguez … out of circulation for 30 plus years may not be the ultimate answer,” the defense attorney, Leigh Dav is, told the judge. “We’ve been at it for many, many years and it hasn’t accomplished anything.”
“Well, isn’t that the job of Congress and not me?” Pittman said.
Dallas defense attorney Stephen Green said he thinks North Texas federal judges generally follow the sentencing guidelines because they like consistency and believe it avoids unfair sentencing disparities.
“First, the guidelines provide some framework to evaluate cases. That’s helpful to judges, especially those judges that don’t have a background in criminal law,” Green said. “Second, guideline sentences are presumed reasonable on appeal, so there is minimal risk to a sentence being overturned if the sentence is within the guidelines.”
Tough sentences in North Texas aren’t limited to meth. This area also is home to some of the longest sentences for drug crimes in general, according to sentencing data. The average drug sentence given by McBryde in Fort Worth, for example, was 17 years — nearly three times the national average. McBryde served for three decades on the bench before his death in 2022.
He was not an anomaly. All but two federal judges in the Northern District of Texas were also above the national average.
Of the 16 sitting judges in the Northern District of Texas, 14 were appointed by Republican presidents.
Researchers have found that Republican-appointed judges, on average, hand down longer sentences than those appointed by Democrats.
The case of Jonathan Rivas Estrada illustrates how even first-time offenders can receive long sentences under the federal guidelines.
Estrada was 23 when he pleaded guilty to a meth offense in 2016 in North Texas.
Despite his plea, he refused to cooperate with authorities. His Dallas attorney, Frank Perez, said his client had a good reason: Cooperating would almost certainly trigger a response by the deadly drug cartels against his family in Mexico. The prosecutor said Estrada was a high-level manager of a Mexico-based meth operation who recruited others to come to the U.S. to work for them. Estrada also was in charge of the organization’s money laundering efforts, court records show.
Perez said his client’s primary responsibility was money laundering. He said Estrada didn’t carry a weapon and was not a violent person. He argued in his sentencing memo that lawmakers increased meth penalties for no other reason than to appear tough on drugs.
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant sentenced Estrada to 35 years in prison.
It could have been worse. The prosecutor said Estrada deserved a life sentence — the punishment recommended in the sentencing guidelines.
Danger and deterrence
The degree to which society punishes criminals often is related to how harmful the criminal act is to others. North Texas prosecutors continue to argue to federal judges that long sentences for meth are justified due to the drug’s dangers. Assistant U.S. Attorney George Leal said at a May 2023 sentencing in Dallas that fatal meth overdoses have risen in the U.S.
“So I would argue that it is a dangerous drug and a scary drug,” Leal told the judge, “definitely to the people that use it, definitely to the people that are dying from it, and definitely to the families that are having to deal with those deaths.”
Meth is an addictive stimulant that was developed in the late 19th century. Marketed to improve alertness, the drug was prescribed in pill form and sold in pharmacies across Europe beginning in the 1930s. It’s still available today in small doses as a prescription medication called Desoxyn to treat attention deficit disorders. Adderall, which is chemically similar to meth, also is popularly prescribed for such conditions.
The illegal variety of meth, like Desoxyn, heightens alertness and energy, allowing users to increase their productivity. It also produces euphoria and dulls pain. It can be injected, snorted, smoked or swallowed, but experienced users smoke or inject it for a more potent and immediate effect. Meth raises heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature. Long-term use can cause anxiety, suicidal thoughts, insomnia, psychotic behavior, paranoia, delusions and hallucinations.
The question for many, though, isn’t whether meth is dangerous — it clearly is — but rather is it more dangerous than other drugs that carry much shorter sentences? The answer? It’s not.
Richard Rawson, the retired co-director of UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs and professor emeritus at the college’s psychiatry department, said there’s no evidence to support meth sentences that are 10 to 100 times longer than penalties for other hard drugs.
Opioids and its synthetic varieties such as fentanyl are the leading cause of drug deaths, having been involved in 75% of all U.S. fatal overdoses in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meth and other psychostimulants such as amphetamines accounted for 31.5% of all overdose deaths in 2022, according to the CDC data, which is the most recent available. There is some overlap in the numbers, officials explained, because sometimes deaths involve more than one drug. Deaths attributed to meth are on the rise, but research shows that meth-related deaths are increasingly occurring when used in combination with opioids. For example, a study published last year in the American Journal of Public Health found that an increasing number of U.S. meth-related deaths involved heroin or fentanyl.
Dallas County health officials released a report that said 70.5% of all overdose deaths in Dallas-Fort Worth in 2022 were related to fentanyl.
Meth use also led to fewer hospital emergency room visits than alcohol, heroin and other opiates in 2011, 2021 and 2022, according to studies by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In 2022, alcohol use led to 45% of all ER drug visits — more than any other drug. Meth was the fourth most common cause, accounting for 8%, behind opiates and cannabis, the HHS agency reported.
Rawson has researched meth’s effects and overseen clinical trials on drug addiction treatments. The meth made by the Mexican cartels, he said, is pure and potent.
“On the other hand, the cocaine being produced by the Colombians is also very pure,” he said. “Do you want to be hit by a truck or a bus? I’m not sure there’s any way to justify those different sentencing guidelines.”
Mark Bennett, a former Iowa federal judge who is a professor at Drake University Law School in Des Moines, agreed that the federal meth sentencing guidelines are not based on science or any sort of empirical study.
He retired from the bench in the Northern District of Iowa in 2019 after serving 25 years. During that time, Bennett stopped following the meth guidelines, opting for less punishment than was recommended.
“I just couldn’t stomach these incredibly long sentences,” said Bennett, now director of the Institute for Justice Reform & Innovation at Drake.
Many federal judges like Bennett say punishment should be based on scientific evidence about the danger of the drugs. They argue a better indicator of blame is a defendant’s role in the offense.
And that was the original intent.
The harshest of federal drug penalties were intended for drug kingpins, according to transcripts of congressional debate on the laws in 1986.
However, an extensive study of meth cases released in June 2024 by the Sentencing Commission found that almost 90% of offenders were not leaders or members of a criminal organization.
More than one-third were wholesalers, about a quarter were couriers, and roughly 12% of defendants were street dealers, the study said. An earlier report by the Sentencing Commission found that most of the defendants convicted in 2016 were drug wholesalers and couriers.
Defense attorneys say federal drug investigations often target those who are lower in drug trafficking organizations while top leaders evade prosecution. Also, those high enough in a drug distribution hierarchy can cooperate and provide information in exchange for leniency.
As one Texas defense attorney, Douglas A’Hern, put it, “They are being rewarded for having a higher level of criminality.”
Agne Vasquez, 40, a first-time offender who served as a lookout and security for a meth house, received almost 25 years in prison in December 2013. One of the government witnesses who testified against him in Fort Worth was the leader of the trafficking organization, Tony Hernandez, court records show.
The Drug Enforcement Administration named the drug organization after Hernandez, 41, and said he imported meth from Mexico and distributed it across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Hernandez was sentenced in 2013 to 16.6 years and was released in 2021 after serving about eight years, records show.
Eric Sterling, a retired executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, said the federal government should focus more on high-level traffickers who operate with impunity and leave other drug cases to state courts. Top leaders, Sterling said, arrange shipments and command de facto armies of hitmen.
“Nobody the federal government is prosecuting for drugs should be so poor that they need the public defender,” he said.
Defense attorneys say the cartels send smaller operators to handle the most dangerous tasks such as transportation and distribution.
Prosecutors see these participants as integral to trafficking operations that destroy communities.
Paul Cassell, a University of Utah law professor and former Utah federal judge, said tough drug penalties are designed to encourage offenders to cooperate.
“Given the high stakes involved,” he said, “there has to be some significant credit that can be given to someone for providing assistance.”
Federal judges in the Northern District of Texas have cited another justification for harsh meth sentences: deterrence.
But some are beginning to express doubts about that as well.
Senior District Judge Barbara Lynn said in a March 2024 sentencing hearing she would “assume” her punishments have some deterrent effect when she sent a meth dealer to prison for 27 years earlier this year in Dallas.
“Because the participation in serious drug offenses like this has marched on for all the years I’ve been a judge, I have to question whether there is an actual deterrence on those who might engage in this kind of conduct,” she said. “But hope springs eternal.”
The reality is that meth remains cheap and abundant in North Texas and across the U.S., federal authorities say, and it is being smuggled into the U.S. in record numbers.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized about 11,000 pounds of meth in 2013. A decade later, the agency confiscated 140,000 pounds of the drug at the Southwest border, the Sentencing Commission said in its June 2024 meth report.
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kull acknowledged at a June 2022 meth sentencing in Dallas that severe punishments didn’t seem to dissuade people from taking drug-related jobs.
“I am prosecuting more cases like this than I have in my entire career,” Kull said. “The cartels keep assigning these people up here with these methamphetamine labs and huge amounts of methamphetamine, and I am not sure the deterrence message is being heard.”
Weight drives sentences
One reason meth sentences are disproportionately harsh is because the federal criminal system relies heavily on drug weight to assess punishment.
But not all illegal drugs are treated the same.
It takes just 10 pounds of crystal meth, the most common form of the drug, to reach the highest punishment in federal sentencing. Conversely, a drug dealer would have to be caught with as much as 990 pounds of cocaine, 200 pounds of heroin or 55 pounds of crack cocaine to reach the same level.
Drug weight is one of the most common ways for prosecutors to drive up meth sentences.
Consider the case of Gomez Mora, the 50-year-old meth cook.
He was living in poverty in a town west of Mexico City when he came to North Texas without authorization to work for a drug cartel, court records said. He helped convert liquid meth into crystal form in a drug house where he slept on an air mattress on the floor, according to his case file.
When he was arrested, Gomez Mora wasn’t armed and had no criminal record. In the grand scheme of things, he was a low-level worker, his attorney said during the sentencing hearing.
But the house he was staying at in the Dallas area contained a lot of meth owned by a Mexican drug cartel — about 100 kilos or roughly 220 pounds, records show. Because of that weight, Gomez Mora’s sentencing range meant he faced up to 27 years. Green, his defense attorney, argued his client was merely a pawn in the cartel’s operation — someone sleeping amid chemical fumes and “taking on extraordinary risk for strangers.”
“The people that were making money off of this, the real money,” Green said, “are in Mexico.”
Gomez Mora addressed the judge before learning his sentence.
“In terms of the house,” he said, “I was there because I didn’t have anywhere to go. In my wallet, there wasn’t a single dollar.”
Kull, the Dallas prosecutor, had a different take.
“He’s part of the drug wheel that keeps the cartels afloat,” he told U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr.
When he handed down his sentence in May 2023, Starr said he gave Gomez Mora a break because of his age and lack of a criminal history. He faced 27 years. That break? Twenty-one years in prison — or roughly three times the median sentence served for rape.
Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor and current law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, said using weight as a primary driver of sentences doesn’t make sense.
A kingpin who imports 150 kilograms of cocaine into the U.S., Osler said, faces the same base offense level as the trucker he paid $1,000 to haul it across the border.
“When we tag all members of a conspiracy with the same base offense level based on the weight of narcotics,” Osler told the Sentencing Commission in 2017, “we obliterate any sense of proportionality.”
Various conditions — called enhancements
Beyond weight, other variables affect drug sentences, such as the purity of drugs.
The meth guidelines tack on additional punishment for high purity levels — a treatment that does not apply to heroin and cocaine. North Texas judges routinely approve these extra penalties, court records show, because most crystal meth is made highly pure in big labs in Mexico and then sent across the border into the U.S.
Critics, including some judges and defense attorneys, say high meth purity was an accurate measure of culpability when the law was passed in the late 1980s, under the theory that highly pure meth was linked to kingpins or those with cartel connections. But that was when most meth was impure, having been made in the U.S. in ramshackle rural labs. Now, almost all meth — more than 97% — comes from Mexico and is highly pure.
The result is that virtually every North Texas defendant now faces the stiffer sentence for higher purity, regardless of their role in the operation.
U.S. District Judge Jill Otake in Hawaii wrote to the Sentencing Commission in June to ask it to revise the rules governing meth.
“I can assure you based on my experience that even the lowest-level meth dealers are selling very pure (usually 90% or above) meth,” she wrote. “The result is that the guidelines are incredibly high for even the lowest-level meth dealers, the majority of whom are themselves addicts.”
Laboratory testing for purity was performed in about three-quarters of meth cases, the Sentencing Commission found in a 66-page report released in June 2024 on meth trafficking cases in the federal criminal justice system.
But laboratory testing practices varied across the nation, meaning meth defendants with similar circumstances could receive different outcomes depending on where they’re prosecuted, the report concluded.
Judges in North Texas have allowed purity to be determined by testing drugs not found on the person charged but rather on drugs that were confiscated from a co-defendant in a conspiracy case. Judges also have relied on informant testimony, in lieu of testing.
Sydney Melissa Navarro, 40, told The News she first started using meth right after high school while still in her teens. It led to a life of drug addiction and petty crime. She became stuck in an abusive relationship with a drug dealer while in her 20s, and the couple made street sales of meth out of motel rooms.
Navarro was arrested and pleaded guilty in federal court in Fort Worth to a meth charge. Her meth was deemed highly pure based on testing of a sample taken from her supplier, who also was convicted in the case, court records show. A judge sentenced her to 27 years in prison.
Other factors that drive up sentences are more specific to jurisdictions covered by the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in New Orleans and covers Texas. One of those factors is an enhancement — or added punishment — for importation.
The 5th Circuit is one of only two appeals courts to rule that defendants don’t need to know the origin of the meth they sold to receive an importation punishment enhancement.
In other U.S. circuits, prosecutors are required to prove defendants played some role in transporting the drug across the border for that enhancement to apply. It was intended to be used against high-ranking offenders, but The News’ analysis shows it’s routinely used against any North Texas meth defendant.
It added 3.5 years to the sentence of Gomez Mora, the meth cook with no prior convictions. Gomez Mora played no role in the drug’s importation into Texas or its purity, according to court records.
“When it applies in every single case, it is not a good indicator of increased culpability,” said Green, his attorney.
The Sentencing Commission said in its June meth report that just 7% of meth offenders nationwide received the importation enhancement in 2022. But The News, in reviewing hundreds of meth cases over multiple years, did not find an instance in which the enhancement was not applied in the northern or eastern districts of Texas.
Similarly, the 5th Circuit also has ruled that drug defendants can be punished for crimes they didn’t know about that were committed by co-defendants in a conspiracy case. For example, guns that belonged to others in a conspiracy can be used against defendants even if they had no knowledge of them.
It doesn’t take much to prove at a sentencing hearing that a gun was involved in a drug case. If police, for example, find an unloaded gun in someone’s dresser drawer, harsher penalties can apply to all involved.
Especially troubling to some is that prosecutors can present uncorroborated evidence at sentencing from witnesses who might also face charges and are looking for a deal. Such evidence would not be admissible at trial, but the rules are different during the sentencing phase.
One cooperating witness — a drug dealer — told federal agents she saw meth dealer Richie Louis Krase with a gun. He was never caught with one, but it increased his punishment by more than three years, court records show.
Krase objected, but the judge in the case, McBryde, said at the 2018 sentencing hearing that Krase had the burden of proving he did not have a gun. McBryde ruled there was no evidence to show Krase did not carry a handgun. The judge gave him 20 years in prison.
Written witness statements at sentencing also can be a significant factor when it comes to determining the amount of meth involved in the crime.
Not all meth sentences are based on the actual amount of meth seized by agents. In the Northern District of Texas, some drug weight calculations that led to lengthy meth sentences were estimates based on the recollections of a single informant, according to a review of cases.
The 5th Circuit said that was allowable. Defense attorneys note that this would not be permitted in some other parts of the country.
Douglas Berman, a sentencing law expert and law professor at Ohio State University, said different jurisdictions should not have differing applications of the sentencing guidelines.
“It’s unfair,” he said. “The Supreme Court has been deficient in trying to clean some of this up.”
The Supreme Court, however, has ruled that sorting out different interpretations of sentencing law is a job for the Sentencing Commission, which convenes annually to study amendments, Berman said.
“I think it’s overdue for the Supreme Court to help advance the rules of the road, if consistency is a virtue.”
In one Fort Worth case, McBryde found that the written statement of a deceased informant was enough evidence to increase the defendant’s sentence, court records show.
In another case, witnesses attributed about 53 pounds of meth to Javier Zapata Tovar, now 51, at his sentencing. U.S. District Judge Jane Boyle in Dallas expressed concern about relying on second- and third-hand information as well as testimony that’s not supported by any other evidence.
“A person charged with a drug crime can’t understand how it is they are being charged with a certain quantity when it was never actually physically in their hands,” Boyle said at the sentencing.
Boyle called that kind of evidence “a little bit mushy.” But the law allowed it and prosecutors met their burden, she added. She sentenced Zapata Tovar to 20 years in Dallas in 2016.
“We’re back in Roman times when it comes to this stuff,” said Robert Burns, a Dallas defense attorney. “It’s so draconian.”
Federal agents investigating a meth ring learned from intercepted text messages that Mayeli Molina, the young Dallas County mother with a clean record, had bought a little more than 2 pounds of the drug.
She told them she was running an errand for her drug-dealing uncle, and prosecutors offered Molina four years in prison if she pleaded guilty. She elected to go to trial.
If Molina’s case had gone to state court, it might have resulted in probation and a requirement to undergo drug treatment, said one of her attorneys, Sheldon Weisfeld. But this was federal court — and a jury convicted her. Suddenly, other factors came into play — factors allowed by the 5th Circuit to be put before the judge at sentencing.
The judge held Molina responsible for almost 30 pounds of meth based largely on the word of another drug dealer. A judge in 2020 sentenced her to 24 years in a Dallas courtroom for a single meth transaction.
Weisfeld called Molina’s case one of the most difficult in his long career.
“It was a heartbreaker for me,” he said. “Ten years would have been more than enough. Why load her up?”
“It was her uncle’s business,” Weisfeld said. “She was just a runner for him.”
Her case also illustrates the inequities in both punishment based on drug type and on location.
Her uncle, a truck driver, was captured about five months after her arrest, in 2018 in New York. Octavio Molina-Acevedo admitted to traveling across the U.S. to distribute drugs for his Mexican bosses, but Molina-Acevedo was charged with trafficking heroin, not meth. And he was sentenced in Manhattan in the Southern District of New York, in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
While his niece was sentenced to 24 years, he received three years, according to court records. He was released in 2020 after serving just one year. She is scheduled to be released in 2039.
Solutions and ongoing efforts
The solution to this inequity, criminal justice experts say, is simple: focus on defendants’ roles within the drug organization rather than drug weight calculations. And go after the top people — those who call the shots, hold the most responsibilities and make the biggest profits.
Even the Sentencing Commission, which implements Congressional directives, has found fault with the weight-based approach — as early as 2011.
“Commission analysis indicates that the quantity of drugs involved in an offense is not as closely related to the offender’s function in the offense as perhaps Congress expected,” said a commission report that year.
The Sentencing Commission has steadily and increasingly been the recipient of pleas from those in the criminal justice community to make changes to the meth guidelines.
A 2015 Pew Research Center study found that “penalties do not match roles” in drug trafficking cases. Pew reported that the highest rung of drug traffickers made up just 11% of all federal drug cases and that their average sentence was a little more than eight years.
If you’re high enough in the cartel hierarchy, you can cooperate and provide information and also perhaps have your family moved to the U.S. with permission to stay, like some Mexican and Colombian drug lords.
Howard Campbell, a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, has studied Mexican cartels. He called them a “very top-down kind of enterprise” where transporters, sellers and others doing the actual work are paid little and considered disposable.
“It’s the most exploitative version of capitalism you could ever find in which the people at the top make all the profits,” Campbell said.
Many in the drug business, he said, are contractors who don’t know who they’re working for or don’t have details about the organization and its leaders. That’s how the cartels want it, Campbell added.
Puentes, who received 30 years for mailing a single package of meth to a DEA cooperator, was supported financially by his mother, according to his defense attorney, Brett Boone.
“If he is in that business, he’s not doing it profitably, which would indicate to me he’s not doing very much,” Boone said during the sentencing hearing.
He said his client had two cars, neither worth more than $1,500, and he rented a home with a roommate to share expenses. “He’s not the hardened kind of guy that needs a severe sentence,” Boone said.
Osler, the former federal prosecutor who also founded a clemency clinic at the University of St. Thomas, wants Congress to make financial gain the primary determining factor behind culpability.
Osler’s solution: “Illegal narcotics function as a market. We should differentiate offense levels within that market based on the personal financial gain each player receives rather than the weight of the narcotics handled by the enterprise as a whole.”
Cassell, the former federal judge from Utah, agrees financial benefit would be a perfect metric for culpability — in theory. But practically speaking, Cassell said, such a task would be a “very difficult exercise” and perhaps “impossible to ultimately sort out.” How would authorities know, he asked, whether a defendant’s fancy car isn’t leased or borrowed?
“The difficulty is that there’s no tax returns you can look at to determine that,” Cassell said. “Which is probably why quantity rules the day right now.”
Osler disagrees. He said the feds know exactly how to dig into a defendant’s finances because they do it all the time in asset forfeiture cases.
“The people who make it work get rich,” he said. “They’re not driving an old Chevy with the bumper falling off.”
Legal experts also say the Supreme Court or the Sentencing Commission needs to intervene to settle differing interpretations at the circuit court level.
As noted, the 5th Circuit, in particular, has taken a more punitive view of certain sentencing laws and procedures than most other U.S. circuit courts. Reformers criticize its ruling, for example, that allows sentencing judges to consider the uncorroborated testimony of informants and co-defendants in determining drug weight estimates against an offender.
And because of a different 5th Circuit ruling, all the cases of North Texas meth defendants The News reviewed ended with punishment bumps solely because the meth the convicted offenders sold or guarded or transported originated in Mexico — whether they knew that or not.
Reformers say such rulings undermine the consistency intended by sentencing guidelines — and significantly drive an inequity largely based on location.
Until such reform takes place, the inequities in sentencing will continue including the one endured by Betzabel Banda-Martinez.
Banda-Martinez was caught transporting a small amount of meth for her abusive drug dealing husband, court records show. She was sentenced to a Fort Worth prison in 2019.
While Banda-Martinez was in prison, Luis Curiel — a corrections lieutenant who trained guards on prison rape prevention — sexually assaulted her multiple times in 2021, authorities said.
Banda-Martinez was in the midst of an 11-year prison sentence for her meth crime. Curiel, 47, pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual abuse of a ward.
His sentence? Eighteen months.