The Second Chance Act is the legislation John Kiriakou used to obtain the release of fellow prisoners at FCI Loretto. In his account it had just passed Congress and been signed into law by President Barack Obama while he was inside.[1]
Kiriakou learned about it from The New York Times. He received the paper daily and carried it down to Mark Lanzalotti’s cell, where Lanzalotti received USA Today; the two men swapped.[1]
What it offered
As Kiriakou describes the article, the law addressed people who had no violence in their crime and who had received draconian sentences — where, if they were prosecuted today, they would receive shorter terms.[2]
The mechanism was a petition to the Justice Department. The department would review the case, and if the prisoner qualified it would engage an A-list firm to represent him at a resentencing hearing.[2]
The Lanzalotti petition
Kiriakou told Lanzalotti the article was about him. Lanzalotti had received triple life without parole for a first-time, non-violent drug conspiracy, reduced on appeal to 30 years; Kiriakou called him the poster boy for the law.[2][3]
Lanzalotti’s answer was that he would not know where to begin and was not smart enough to handle something like that. Kiriakou said he would write it, on the grounds that Lanzalotti did not deserve to be in prison — and he did.[2][4]
Kiriakou left Loretto on 3 February 2015, after 23 months. In August 2015 Lanzalotti’s mother telephoned him in tears; when he asked what had happened, she told him the appeal he had written had worked and Lanzalotti was being released 17 years into the 30-year sentence.[4]
Kiriakou describes the release procedure that followed: a prisoner slated for release after a long sentence is let out for eight hours to obtain a birth certificate, a Social Security card and a driving licence, then returns to the prison. Lanzalotti’s mother arranged a surprise party in that window; he arrived, was surprised, and then had to leave for the licensing office. He was released properly eight weeks later.[5]
Other cases
Kiriakou reports at least one other Loretto prisoner freed under the law: Clint Goswick, a Texas man convicted on a conspiracy theory of liability who, in Kiriakou’s telling, argued that he had not had the gun and had not had any drugs — and whom the Justice Department agreed with and released.[6]