Just hours after Charlie Scandrett Sr. cradled his face in his hands as he sat in a courtroom gallery behind his son, defendant Charlie Scandrett Jr., he walked out behind him outside the Clayton County Jail.
“It appears to me the sentence was proper and legal,” Judge Matthew Simmons said. “It’s just not right.”
“He ain’t never gave up. None of us never gave up. We trust in god. This is it. We trust in god, we knew he eventually was gonna make a way when the time was right,” his sister said.
“I was thanking god for being so good to me and bringing him, bringing him home. Nobody knows but God and I, what that (did) for me,” Scandrett’s father said.
The situation doesn’t involve guilt or innocence so much as the length of the sentence relative to the crime.
“He had less than a gram of cocaine,” Clayton County District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson said. "If it happened today, he would go to drug court and get treatment and not go to prison.”
Lawson said she learned Charlie Scandrett Jr. Had three prior relatively minor drug cases leading to his sentence as a recidivist in 1997 under laws that have since changed
Lawson said she learned about Scandrett's situation, that he had served close to 18 years and faced a dozen more if nothing changed, from the southern center for human rights. She joined the center's efforts to have him released for time served, which Simmons granted.
“We learned about the case through the efforts of Mr. Scandrett’s father,” Mulvaney said. “God worked through me today to achieve justice.”
Charlie Scandrett Sr. said his son was an addict at the time he was arrested.
