Connecticut Native's Life Sentence Reduced by Presidential Commute

A former Connecticut resident, who toured the country to watch Grateful Dead concerts, had been sentenced to life in prison for selling LSD, but he has been granted clemency by President Barack Obama after serving 22 years in prison, according to media reports.

Timothy Tyler, 47, was just 25 when he was sentenced to die in prison on July 19, 1994. Due to the clemency, he will now be due for release from federal prison in Waymart, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 30, 2018.

He was one of the 111 federal inmates whose sentences were commuted on Tuesday, bringing the total to 673 since Obama took office. The inmates were mainly in prison for non-violent drug offenses.

Tyler, who grew up in Terryville and Wolcott, was arrested in Florida and sentenced to prison without the possibility of parole for selling LSD to a police informant, Business Insider reported. He had never been to prison, but a judge was forced to give him prison for life due to two prior convictions.

Due to Tyler living at his father’s home and using his address for selling drugs, his father was also implicated in the sales, Live for Live Music reported. His father was sentenced to prison and died eight years into his 10-year sentence.

It was not until 2012 that Tyler was allowed to have an approved MP3 player and listen to music again, HeadCount reported. While he could not get all the Grateful Dead he wanted due to limited selection, it was the best news Tyler had heard after spending nearly half his life in prison.

Prison was hard on Tyler in a number of ways, even leading to him having sex with men just for the affection and escape it provided, Business Insider reported. He had dated women before prison.

Tyler had been a Deadhead before prison, touring around the country to watch Grateful Dead concerts, according to HeadCount. The culture of these concerts typically involved heavy use of drugs, particularly LSD.

Since the "War on Drugs" began in the 1980s, the number of people in jail for drug offenses increased from 41,000 in 1980 to nearly a half-million in 2014, according to The Sentencing Project, and one in nine people are serving life sentences. Advocates for reducing prison populations say that sentences of nonviolent offenses should be capped at 20 years.

Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy said in a release Wednesday that he applauded Obama's decision to grant commutations and said the charges for these inmates were unduly harsh under outdated laws.

“Nationwide, both sides of the aisle are recognizing that a system of harsh, mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses reflect backwards policymaking," Malloy said in the release. “These commutations by President Obama are an important step forward not just for the individuals they affect, but for the conversations they spawn and the attitudes they change. We all must recognize that to lower crime and reverse decades of backwards policies, we must rethink our approach. President Obama again showed tremendous leadership today.”

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