11th Conviction Earns Dealer 10 Years

Understandable relapse worth another chance?

Or proof of hopeless recidivism?

A judge wrestled with those two takes on a 53-year-old man’s latest drug-dealing conviction as he decided whether to send him back to prison for what could be the rest of his life.

The man, Frank Carr, has spent more than half his life behind bars. He appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Robert Chatigny on Monday morning, via a hearing conducted entirely over Zoom, to be sentenced.

The hearing became a debate over how to view a repeated offender’s behavior and how that should affect his possibility for future freedom.

In the end, Carr received the mandatory minimum sentence of ten years in prison, plus an additional six months, since his crime violated the supervised release conditions from a previous conviction.

Prosecutor Anthony Kaplan had argued that Carr should receive a sentence within the probation office’s guideline range of 140 to 175 months, or up to 14 and a half years.

Carr was one of 25 members of the Island Brothers gang whom the FBI and New Haven police arrested in July of 2019 for drug trafficking as part of ​“Operation Fantasy Island.” Carr specifically was charged with dealing over 110 grams of crack cocaine and over 50 grams of cocaine hydrochloride; he pled guilty to the offense.

Kaplan argued that Carr’s history in and out of prison, amounting to 23 years spent incarcerated for ten felony convictions over the course of his adult life, suggests that a prison sentence was unlikely to prompt Carr to change his behavior at age 53.

Therefore, Kaplan argued, Carr should receive more time than the mandatory minimum sentence — keeping him away from the rest of society as long as possible, rather than leaping to give him another chance.

Defense attorney Frank Cannatelli responded that Carr’s age — as well as his medical conditions — are exactly the reason Carr should receive the least amount of prison time possible.

Carr returned to drug trafficking after a relapse in his own cocaine addiction coincided with a period of financial stress, the defense set forth.

“Mr. Carr will need treatment and drug addiction services for the rest of his life,” Cannatelli said. ​“Sickness” — including addiction — ​“doesn’t require throwing a person behind bars for the rest of his life. It warrants more care and compassion, not less.”

Cannatelli also referenced the rapid spread of Covid-19 in prisons across the country, where incarcerated people typically share crowded bathrooms, dining rooms, and other living spaces that make social distancing difficult. Connecticut prisons have reported a spike in cases since November. Carr’s experience with a stage 3 kidney disorder, a heart condition — Aortic Stenosis — that has encumbered his breathing, and hypertension put him at a greater risk of suffering severe complications from Covid.

“Mr. Carr, with all his medical issues, realizes that he’s got a better chance, while incarcerated, of getting Covid-19,” Cannatelli argued. ​“And if he does [contract the virus], he knows he doesn’t have a good chance of surviving.”

“He’s basically looking at a life sentence. He may not survive the sentence that your honor imposes today,” Cannatelli said. This realization, he argued, led Carr to consider the prison sentence awaiting him with more gravity than his previous convictions.

When Carr spoke to the court, he recounted that upon his transition out of prison in 2015, he secured a job at Wendy’s. He subsequently found work at a series of home health care agencies, an immigration support organization, a self-started transportation company for New Haven Public School students. Then he founded a restaurant with ​“all my life savings.”

When the restaurant — a pizzeria called Mama Rosa’s — flopped, ​“I struggled to pay rent,” Carr said, adding that he relapsed in his addiction. ​“I fell hard. I resorted to selling small quantities of drugs to make ends meet.”

Prosecutor Kaplan rejected this narrative. He noted that Carr took 67 drug tests after his 2015 release, all of which turned up negative.

“I think the drug addiction is an excuse,” he said. ​“There’s no evidence except his own words that he did relapse, and there’s no evidence to think that if he did relapse that it’s tied to drug dealing.”

Kaplan also argued that Carr’s age warrants more incarceration, not less. He is unlikely to ​“age out” of drug trafficking at this point in his life, he said, citing a statistic that people in their fifties convicted of category 6 offenses have a 64.9 percent recidivism rate.

“Neither his criminal convictions nor his time in custody has deterred him from criminal activity,” Kaplan stressed.

Marguerie Gilbert, a cousin of Carr, spontaneously volunteered to testify on his behalf after observing the hearing via Zoom.

“There has not been any resources available or anything given to him to help him overcome this addiction that he has. He has tried numerous times over and over,” she said. ​“I know it doesn’t sound good here today, but I’m praying that you would find grace for my cousin today. He can change with some support in place and some help.”

After a brief recess, Chatigny decided on the minimum ten-year sentence. He noted Carr’s age, medical conditions, and previous (if temporary, according to the defense) success in rehabilitation and addition programs.

With respect to the defense’s argument that Carr was motivated by addiction, ​“I have viewed Mr. Carr’s claim with some skepticism, [but] I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt and conclude that he did relapse into some drug use,” said Chatigny.

Chatigny added that he was persuaded by the argument that in the face of financial stress, Carr ​“got back to what he knew, which is the world of significant drug trafficking.”

“You can make a lot more money selling drugs than you can working at Wendy’s,” he noted.

As the judge issued his ruling, Carr processed the words — and the ten year sentence ahead of him — from behind the computer screen, holding his head with clasped hands.