Prosecutors Fight Sentence Reduction for Murder Convict Adrian Peeler

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Prosecutors believed justice was served nearly two decades ago when Adrian Peeler was sentenced to a combined 60 years in state and federal prisons for his roles in Bridgeport’s cocaine trade and the 1999 killings of an 8-year-old murder trial witness and the boy’s mother.

Peeler, however, could be a free man next year, if his pending request for a sentence reduction under a national criminal justice reform law is approved by a federal judge.

State and federal authorities and the victims’ relatives are stridently opposed. In a recent letter to Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, Bridgeport State’s Attorney Joseph Corradino and prosecutor Susan Campbell cited Peeler’s violent criminal history and said he should not qualify for a sentence reduction under the First Step Act signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018.

Thousands of federal prisoners across the country have been granted sentence reductions under the First Step Act, which aimed to address concerns that too many Americans were imprisoned for nonviolent crimes as a result of the drug war.

“Simply put: the defendant is not a nonviolent drug offender for whom this legislation was intended,” they wrote in the Dec. 31 letter. “He and his brother terrorized the streets of Bridgeport, destroying the very community that raised him, disgracing the memory of their mother who was a Bridgeport police officer, and leaving drugs and bodies in their wake.”

Peeler’s 25-year state prison sentence in the killings of Karen Clarke and her son, Leroy “B.J.” Brown, ends in January 2022 and he is scheduled to be immediately transferred to federal prison to begin a 35-year sentence for drug dealing. But he is asking a federal judge to reduce the federal sentence to time served in state prison and change it from consecutive to concurrent with the state sentence.

If successful, Peeler, now 44, would be a free man in a year. It is not clear when the judge will rule.

Peeler argues in court documents that his federal sentence is only for dealing drugs and is exactly the kind of lengthy drug sentence targeted by the First Step Act. He also submitted letters of support from college professors and fellow inmates praising his efforts to educate himself and mentor other prisoners while behind bars.

“I give no reasons for, nor do I make any excuses for the choices that I have made,” Peeler wrote in a letter to the federal judge considering the First Step Act arguments.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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