Reformed Hill Drug Dealer Heads To Prison

The ex-leader of a local drug trafficking group will get to continue ​“breaking the cycle” and rebuilding his life — after serving a 78-month prison sentence.

At his tear-filled court proceeding, a federal judge weighed the different messages the sentence could send.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael P. Shea Monday sentenced the defendant, Jermayne Butler, to the 78 months of prison, plus four additional years of supervised release, for the charge of conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine.

Butler was the leader of a 19-person operation selling crack and oxycodone based in the Hill neighborhood. The 19 people were arrested in February of 2018 after a months-long FBI investigation. Many of the other defendants have already been sentenced. Butler pled guilty to the cocaine charges last year.

Butler faced a minimum of five years and a maximum of 40 years in prison.

Assistant U.S. States Attorney Patrick Caruso asked Shea to issue a sentence ranging from 121 to 151 months, stressing Butler’s leadership role as well as the need to deter the public from committing similar crimes.

Butler’s attorney, Kelly Barrett, asked Shea to issue the minimum sentence of 60 months, highlighting Butler’s efforts to rebuild his life and successful participation in rehab.

Inside the Hartford courtroom, in a proceeding streamed to the public via Zoom, Butler told the judge that his arrest had been a wake-up call.

Butler was raised by his mother, who, according to the defense, was addicted to both gambling and crack cocaine. He started using drugs and gambling himself at the age of 11. Eventually, he also developed addictions.

Around the same time, he suffered from two traumatic brain injuries that impacted his impulse control, according to the defense. Until after his 2018 arrest at the age of 36, he had never held a legal job.

The defense argued that Butler sold drugs in order to fuel his addiction. He had been convicted six times prior to 2018 for non-violent, drug-related offenses.

“You started off as young as I started off, you don’t see that you’re doing wrong,” Butler said in court of his years gambling and selling drugs. ​“Everybody’s doing it around you … Once you get caught up in that cycle, it’s hard to get out.”

“When you not in that life no more, you see the hurt and the damage that you’re causing your loved ones, family, friends, people that you don’t know,” he said through tears.

Butler has spent shorter stints behind bars. After his arrest in 2018, he confronted his addictions to gambling and opioids.

Earl Sanford, a counselor at Problem Gambling Services who worked with Butler, said that Butler had never been asked about his gambling prior to that moment; he was diagnosed with severe gambling disorder and subsequently began formal treatment. He voluntarily submitted a self-exclusion form to the Mohegan Sun casino, meaning that he can be forcibly removed from the premises should he show up again.

Butler secured a dishwashing job. He started driving cars for Meals on Wheels, an organization that delivers food to the homebound. He lost his job after Covid-19 hit the U.S., but the company plans to hire him back, according to the defense. During the past few months, he has been homeschooling his two young kids as his partner has worked in a hospital.

“It’s sad to say, but I’m grateful that I went through all that I went through in the past two and a half years,” Butler said. ​“I basically had to learn how to live again.”

Two counselors who have worked with Butler testified to his commitment to the various programs he entered — all of which he succeeded in completing.

“To see him work as hard as he has worked — I have never in all my 32 years of recovery seen a story like his,” said Steven Matos, a recovery support specialist at Bettor Choice. He testified that Butler was an ​“open and honest” presence at group counseling meetings and often gave co-participants feedback.

Matos expressed concern about the prison time that Butler would face, given his addiction. ​“Being incarcerated, it’s almost like a mini-casino,” he said. ​“Gambling goes on 24/7. It is a huge challenge for someone with a gambling addiction.”

“Jermayne is willing to do the work in recovery,” he added, but ​“the longer that [prison term] may go on, the more difficult it might be.”

Judge Shea asked Butler about this possibility.

“I’ll put myself in any programs … continuing to rehabilitate myself,” Butler replied. ​“It’s going to be hard.”

Given Butler’s successful record of rehabilitation, Barrett argued that a need to protect the public and to deter Butler from committing future crimes should not factor into his prison sentence. She asked for the minimum sentence of five years in prison.

“He has shown over the past 26 months that prison is not needed to incapacitate him,” she said. ​“He can live in public.”

Judges often view sentences as a means of sending the message to the public about a particular crime, Barrett said. ​“It can be a message of hope. It can be a message that if you do pull yourself up with your full true grit, that’s something that can give other people hope to change as well.”

In response, Caruso stressed that Butler’s record of rehabilitation did not undo the harm caused by his crime.

“How many more Karyn Butlers, how many more Jermayne Butlers are there because of what Mr. Butler did?” Caruso asked, referring to Butler’s and his mother’s drug addictions. ​“The harm in this case is significant.” Part of the point of a sentence, he argued, is to punish the offender for such harm.

In addition, Caruso argued that the sentencing should account for ​“not just Mr. Butler’s individual respect for the law, but respect for the law more broadly.” He noted that Butler’s case would be covered in the news. The public would be paying attention to the length of Butler’s sentence, Caruso said, and a lesser sentence would convey a sense that the crime carried less weight.

The lawyers disagreed about the extent to which Butler was a ringleader of his group. Barrett argued that while Butler has accepted responsibility for leading the group in his capacity as the supplier, the trafficking ring was not formalized in a hierarchical way to the extent that most other drug groups are.

“He did supply others with drugs, and he did have others hold his phone for him, but he did not order people to sell drugs for him. He did not recruit people to sell drugs,” she said. She added that Butler made hand-to-hand sales himself. ​“He was not a traditional drug leader.”

Caruso agreed that Butler’s group did not have a set-in-stone hierarchy, but he argued that few drug dealing groups do. It’s common, he said, for these groups to comprise ​“people that know each other all their life, that are willing to trust somebody to engage in a criminal act with them.” As the supplier, Butler had the leadership role in the group, Caruso said.

As he announced his decision, Shea reflected on the purpose that the sentence would serve — not only in its effect Butler’s life, but in the message it would send to the public.

Shea said he agreed with Barrett that the prison sentence would not have to factor in a need of deterring Butler from committing future crimes, given his professed remorse and rehabilitation efforts. He called Butler’s behavior on pretrial release ​“extraordinarily strong” in his experience as a judge.

Yet Shea agreed with Caruso that there were other concerns that warranted a sentence above the minimum, including Butler’s leadership of the group, the ​“seriousness of the offense,” and the need to ​“promote respect for the law” among the general public.

The sentence would be, in part, a punishment. Butler ​“perpetuated the misery, the hopelessness that comes with injecting crack into a neighborhood,” said Shea. ​“Even those who don’t become addicts or whose brothers and sisters become dealers become affected; they have to step over crack pipes, they have to make sure they don’t get in the way of the dangerous business. This ruins neighborhoods and families.”

Shea also factored in Butler’s previous offenses, stating a belief that ​“incremental sentencing does play a role in promoting respect for the law.” He decided on a sentence close to twice the length of Butler’s longest previous stint in prison, equaling 78 months, or around six and a half years.