right. after a failed appeal while he had resigned himself to the twenty years behind bars until a stranger sharon l. malloy a medical malpractise lawyer unexpectedly gave him some hope. elmo a is currently paying for waller's post conviction relief thanks to an article that i found two years ago in the new york times i have a side occupation which is that i am dedicating. my free time to the effort to get orrible lee waller and out of jail what specifically outraged this is because i really felt that there hadn't been any wrongdoing on his part and because he was a person who acted on principle and rejected a plea deal that was offered by the prosecutors that this ended up biting him in the butt you seem pretty confident going into the trial what happened right well it

it seems like everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong i mean the level of preparation was just not there according to l molay wallers the original lawyer did not conduct in person interviews with his witnesses and failed to call additional witnesses who could have helped the case. the break that lee needed was a new trial there's no doubt in my mind that were this case to be retried with a really gung ho attorney with a team of experts behind him or her. lee would have gone free. but john kerry you know i'm doing well i'm just going through these transcripts we finally got them in now we can start going forward with the appeal at ever own pocket elbel they hired florida defense attorney jaya bologna to work on wyler's

appeal. my crew and i are headed down to orlando to talk with giant learn more about wallers case. the unbelievable case you know i have children i have two daughters and if i felt like children or my wife being threatened i'd want to protect myself whenever you have a jury listening to family members usually one time to tell the discreditable members is being bias so it came down to a story of a lever says the boyfriend well the boy's own story you have a saying that someone's pointing a gun in their face and shooting it and there's both a hole that lines up so i think the jury just decided to discredit the self-defense and believe boyfriend at the time of the shooting the boyfriend who's name we've agreed to keep it not amisse was dating sarah while her sixteen year old daughter was the jury aware firing a gun could result in a twenty year sentence when you go to

a jury as an attorney and you know the judge they're not allowed to tell you what the maximum penalty is or what the sentence is going to be because as to influential on their jury and on their decision on their deliberations so they didn't know they may have just thought he made us up on the rest and be like oh i don't believe they actually knew the severity of what was going to be unsaid. while the defense team is currently waiting for the judge's ruling and his appeal. headed to interview while the network color correctional facility just south of tallahassee or so far he has served six of his twenty year sentence from what i can tell well or doesn't fit the description of your average gun felon he's a middle aged married man with two daughters no prior criminal record worked in business management at sea world and lived in the suburbs of orlando. both i don't deliver a letter he was nice to me just to make you sort. of just curious how it's been i'm

not doing too poorly except my skin seems to be boiling off from something i picked up. here about a year and a half ago but i took some damage early on and it just. i mean i had my teeth when i came in here six years ago and you ever imagine you would end up in a place like this oh my gosh no i mean i've taught college i have a master's degree. this is about the last thing in the world i ever thought i would end up doing for retirement plan it is a gated community. but has a retirement plan this would never i can't believe i still can't believe it i got twenty years for firing a gun but again the gun was in my house it's my gun in my house the bullet never left the house it got stopped by two by fours in the wall and no one was hurt. i can be didn't take the plea deal i didn't take it because i hadn't done anything wrong i defended my family in a legal way in my house with my gun and didn't hurt anybody. a week before his

trial the prosecutor tried to persuade waller to take five years probation with no jail time believing in his innocence rejected the plea deal risking being sentenced to a mandatory twenty years. mandatory minimums are a tremendously powerful and blunt instrument the prosecutors routinely use to coerce plea bargains from defendants because they know if if the defendant goes to trial the judge has no option but to give the mandatory minimum if the judge had an option the defendant can say you know i'm not a thug who is robbing a liquor store i'm a family man i have a good job i have no criminal record i think the judge is going to be lenient here they don't have that option with a mandatory minimum and so the prosecutor can just say take this or you're going to prison for twenty years why is stand your ground argument in this case the argument is that if you really feel threatened you would just shoot the person if you really felt that your life was in danger you would fire

a warning shot you would fire at the person who's causing the threat. newburn raises some eye opening points if waller had actually shot the boyfriend would he have gone free based on florida's stand your ground defense or if the judge was allowed to use his discretion to decide the length of the prison sentence how much time would have gotten probably not twenty years. critics point out that mandatory minimums trap people like wyler in the system but what happens when no mandatory minimum soren forest for certain gun crimes. were heading to chicago a city where gun violence has spiraled out of control in two thousand and thirteen there were over two thousand victims of gun violence and four hundred fourteen homicides an f.b.i. report. released just this week branding chicago is the murder capital of america the murder of fifteen year old the dia pendleton an honor student captured national

attention and inspired a mandatory minimum cundall in chicago pendleton was shot and killed while hanging out with friends at a kenwood park michael ward kenneth williams have been charged with her murder idea pendleton was me. and i was her but i got to grow up to carry. this is. an arson that that murdered our daughter. he was. already on a gun charge and had he been there and he got the mandatory minimum he would have been out so i don't it would still be alive today. despite the national trend away from mandatory minimums chicago politicians and law enforcement are rallying behind a proposed gun bill with longer prison sentences in hopes of stemming the violence

. before it was murder i didn't really think about the law as the way been structured because in a climate gun laws actually and it never crossed my mind. we made sure that our children hung around you know other decent children. you know even more all of the ideas financed they were really good kids. idea was very founding a vibrancy to love. today is she was a. major if your daughter ever talk about what she wanted to be when she grew up many thanks just like any kid yeah but like. a lawyer an area her heart was here this is. what i miss most about ideas.

her smile and everything you have. idea pendleton's under student who went to the president's wearing and has a majorette and. she was on track for greatness no two ways and i want to talk to the superintendent of the chicago police department gary mccarthy mccarthy gained national attention as police chief of newark new jersey where he reduced shootings and murders by forty percent in two thousand and eleven he was brought in by mayor rahm emanuel to combat chicago's gun violence and a case of idea pendleton the individual who allegedly fired those shots was a gang member. who was taking retribution for a friend of his who had been shot at by a rival gang but. they were driving around and they saw

a bunch of kids huddled in a park in the rain. one of them snuck up behind and fired shots into the crowd. and it turns out that the crowd was not a crowd of gang members was a crowd of kids who were coming from high school who were not gang members many of whom were honor students including heidi a penalty two men were eventually caught charged twenty year old kenneth williams and eighteen year old michael ward ward allegedly confessed to being the shooter the case didn't have to happen because the actual shooter in that case was convicted of illegal possession of a firearm in november of two thousand and twelve and should have been incarcerated instead he was on the streets two and a half months later to kill somebody. prior to head the is murder ward received no jail time for an illegal weapons charge and violated his probation three times. we need laws. that are going to stem the tide of those guns reaching our streets and then we need significant mandatory minimums to ensure that when we take the gun off

of a criminal they go to jail for actually talking about war for state representative michaels dyleski is the author of the mandatory minimum gun bill which is up for a vote in the houses next session. to pretend mccarthy told us was that our gun laws just didn't work well enough he would find that after arrest and conviction for a gun offense the same offender would be back out on the streets in a short amount of time it too short amount of time for him to adequately be able to police those streets in a way that he felt comfortable doing so the theory behind my bill is if you raise the amount of time imprisonment he's going to break that cycle of people going through the system so fast that they end up back out on the streets committing the very same. crimes senate bill thirteen forty two would increase prison sentences for several gun crimes including possession of an illegal firearm and require offenders to serve at least eighty five percent of their sentences. twelve hundred

miles away in florida it's estimated that one out of one thousand people own a firearm nicknamed the gun shine state florida is home to more gun permits than any other state in america while gun regulation in florida could be called lax the penalties for violent gun crime is anything but. the case of a horrible while or it is living proof of these tough laws claims he was just protecting his family from his daughter's boyfriend but he got twenty years in prison under florida's ten twenty life law for aggravated assault with a firearm. i'm heading to see grady judd the sheriff of polk county to learn more about florida's law he's been a part of florida law enforcement for forty years and was there when ten twenty life was passed i can tell you that back in the day in florida we were having a lot of problems people were robbing stealing shooting so crime was out of control

inmates were serving about a third of their sentence there were other folks that were complaining well this judge gives you five years and this judge gives you twenty years and this judge gives you know years for violent acts. so the legislature acted to make a difference. in one thousand nine hundred nine florida enacted the ten twenty life law this mandatory minimum statute requires a ten year prison sentence for pulling out a gun and a twenty year sentence for firing a gun and a life sentence for shooting or killing someone if done during the commission of a crime. why do you think minimum mandatory why do you think that words mental mandatories makes a difference for several reasons one if you commit a crime and if you're convicted you're absolutely going to prison for this man of time you can't get one lenient judge to send you to the less time in prison you can't get a nother judge to sentence you to more time in prison

a whole goal is to reduce gun cry and now we've got a few people saying well this is that unfair but i can show you another group on the other side whose child has just shot in a drive by saying yes let's keep the ten twenty life and go find that person that shot my child playing in the front yard in the drive by that's what we can't forget the victims. it's interesting to hear the narrative refrain from the law enforcement perspective and it just shows there's no easy answers he made a very compelling case for the role of mandatory minimums in crime reduction. judge statement about victims is really powerful especially after meeting the pendleton's whose fifteen year old daughter at dia was murdered a while or didn't murder anybody nobody was even hurt is the justice system working by locking away waller for twenty years and taking him away from his family for

a while or to this family of victims of the system. we arrange for waller's wife sandy and youngest daughter sarah to come to florida from wausau wisconsin where they live now due to the financial fallout from wallers incarceration they've been unable to return to florida and see him in over five years. already you said i certainly i mean there are you know. i think you know i hear this music you know it's just it's crazy that someone would be punished for something like this and that so extremely you know i was just absolutely stunned when they when they told me that he was going to be in prison for twenty years for shooting a hole in our living room wall i couldn't believe it. how do you feel about this whole thing i felt horrible. you know he's going to be like seventy's eighty's once

he does get out if he does stay the twenty years and that's pretty much is life over in a cell somewhere. and it brings me down a lot of the time i. have asked sandy to take me back to where it all started so i can understand what happened the new owners of her old house have allowed us to visit. it feels like i'm coming back home plus mr heads it is five years when he was arrested i just had to give up the house. i just couldn't do it. we didn't have his income and my income alone was enough to keep up with the bills and the mortgage. and you found this house to live in and the stories behind it well my husband said just going find a house you like. just let me know and then i saw this one and i thought

this is the perfect house it's beautiful. and it was really really hard just having to walk away from the house thinking maybe you know we'd never have another house again. they painted it. and they changed the fence oh so small right this is a. look at it. we were going to retire in the house. when you see the impact that this has had on on this family you know a guy with no criminal record wanting to protect his family and to think this guy has is being punished. twenty years in prison without the possibility of parole because of a mandatory minimum sentence. it really makes you wonder whether these laws make sense or not. the families of victims like the pendleton's whose daughter had dia was murdered are advocating for the mandatory minimum gun

bill as our mayor rahm emanuel law enforce. and other politicians but as the bill gets closer to a vote a number of groups are raising opposition so the bill thirty forty two simply is a knee jerk political reaction to the violence in the city chicago by the mayor of chicago it's merely a political haven i'm tough on crime i caught up with representative ten duncan and i residential housing project to hear more about his concerns. the mayor of chicago he is having us regress back to mandatory minimums from the eighty's in the ninety's and up until now where we clearly have seen that it does not deter crime it does nothing but simply close the prison system it puts a significant strain on our criminal justice system and when you introduce bills like senate bill thirteen forty two there's

a real cost structure that comes with that was the real cost was a real financial impact on every citizen in the state of illinois the question was never answered. under the current law it would cost state about twenty four hundred inmates over ten years or two hundred forty year which would be about five hundred forty million dollars over ten years or fifty four million dollars a year. heavy price tag you know in a state government isn't exactly following with cash right now but my feeling was this was an important policy interest. and i've heard people talk about the cost and the fact is what's the what's the cost of going back to the parents of idea penalty to pay to have her be.