Judge Lagueux didn’t want to lock the young woman up for fifteen years. But he did it.

She’d been arrested with “a few ounces” of crack cocaine, which she intended to sell. She’d been convicted of a similar charge 7 years earlier, when she was 19. And she had once thrown a glass in a bar fight. Oh ugliness.

That made her a “career criminal,” a 3-time loser, a habitual offender, and 15 years was the least the judge was allowed to sentence her to under the mandatory Federal Sentencing “Guidelines.” (Sarcastic quotation marks added.)

He could have given her more time, so really, you could say 26-year old Denise Dallaire was lucky to go away until she was 41. The judge called it an injustice. “I’d like to do something about it, but I can’t.”

Danbury prison. Robert Lowell did several months here for refusing to serve in WWII. Ring Lardner Jr.: nine months for refusing to talk to HUAC. Leona Helmsley: 18 months, tax evasion. Sun Myung Moon: 11 months, tax evasion.

Off to Danbury prison Dallaire went and stayed, year after year. Dallaire thought she deserved prison, just not so much prison. She occupied herself making blankets, hats and pillows for a children’s oncology ward. She and other inmates decorated Christmas trees to be auctioned off to benefit a cancer charity. She organized 600 inmates to raise money – to fight breast cancer – by marching around the yard.

A couple of years after she went to prison, the Supreme Court said the mandatory Sentencing Guidelines were too mandatory, and should be considered merely… guidelines. A few years later, Congress was sufficiently embarrassed by the huge inequity between sentences for crack and cocaine to partially moderate penalties for crack.

None of this was retroactive. It didn’t do Dallaire any good. Another judge, who took his law class on a prison visit every year – and every year, there was Denise! – had gotten interested in Dallaire’s case. It had been ten years, and Dallaire’s mother was dying of cancer. He hoped to get her a presidential pardon, and persuaded a law firm to prepare the request pro bono. It was a long shot.

Evelyn De Morgan, “The Prisoner.” Typical Pre-Raphaelite inmate pining for occupational therapy.

They ran the request past Judge Lagueux to sign off on. Lagueux didn’t think a pardon was likely, but noticed a procedural mistake in the original sentence. A technicality. He suggested they bring the case back before him.

To Dallaire’s amazement, he released her with time served. He said he had hated the mandatory guidelines. “I’m sorry I sent you away for 15 years,” he said.

Dallaire went home and was able to be at her mother’s side for the last 11 days before her death. “They were the most amazing 11 days of my life,” she told the New York Times.

Judge Lagueux thinks the ten years Dallaire spent in prison was a miscarriage of justice. Dallaire thinks her release was a miracle. She plans to work in The Mercy Project, which will try to get sentences commuted for the many people still serving ridiculously long sentences handed down before the 2005 Supreme Court decision and the Congressional crack/cocaine revisions. “I would love to do whatever is necessary to help fix the federal system,” she said.

It is possible to think that Denise Dallaire, a white person who got caught in laws aimed at people of color, received special help because she was noticed. Noticed, perhaps, because she was a well-behaved white person. She deserved the help, and as she knows, so do others. (Now, an apology from the prosecutor – that would be something.)

What about the apology? Is it really possible to say, “Sorry about the decade!” Yes, it is. It is worth apologizing for serious things you can’t undo. Dallaire can’t get those ten years back. She can’t get one more day with her mother. But she can hear that people remember and care about what happened to her. That they don’t want it to keep happening. And that shows respect. It has value.

You often hear someone who’s had a bad deal complain that when it was all over, “They didn’t even say they were sorry.” This time, someone did.