BURNSTEIN COLUMN: White Boy Rick Loses Another Round In What’s Turned Into Shakespearian Struggle For Freedom

The plight of White Boy Rick continues. It’s a seemingly never-ending saga of sorrow, bad luck, misfortune, tragic fate and unadulterated oppression.

The soon-to-be 47 year-old Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe, a one-time teenage drug dealer and illegally-operated underage federal informant from the nearly all-African-American populated inner city of Detroit who became a media sensation in the Crack Era because of his race, swagger and young age and is going on close to 30 years behind bars for a single arrest he took for cocaine possession following a routine traffic stop when he was just 17, has gotten a raw deal his whole life: from his own family, his own attorney, the FBI, the DEA, the Detroit Police Department, the Wayne County Prosecutors Office, the Mayor’s office, the Michigan Parole Board, the press.

You can now add the Michigan State Supreme Court to the list. This week, the court rejected Wershe’s appeal for resentencing by his trial judge, the honorable Diane Hathaway. Last fall, Hathaway ordered Wershe, convicted in January 1988 under a long-defunct state law issuing life prison sentences for first-time offense narcotics cases, resentenced, only to have her decision thwarted by an appeal filed on behalf of Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy which was granted at the state appellate court weeks later.

Wershe is the longest serving non-violent juvenile offender in the state’s correctional system. Now a grandfather six times over, he hasn’t seen the light of a free day in more than 28 years, a guest of the government since he was 18. Oh, did I mention that he was illegally recruited out of eighth grade by the FBI to become a federally-financed drug mole, discarded at 16 after the Feds sucked him dry for information, only to go back to work for the government in prison and helping them build several successful prosecutions, including the biggest corrupt cop bust in Detroit history?

Still, he has no maximum outdate. That means they can keep him in there forever. And if some people have their way they will.

And for what? A few kilos of cocaine (found two blocks from the traffic stop buried underneath a porch)? There’s obviously much more than meets the eye here.

Personal vendettas, well-worn political agendas, racism, his knowledge of an alleged payoff in 1985 to recently-deceased then-Detroit Police Department Homicide Inspector Gil Hill to cover up the accidental slaying of a 13-year old boy in a drive-by shooting. They all play a part.

How these people sleep at night, God only knows. This is a MASSIVE injustice. We’re talking Guinness Book of World Records.

Where’s the Mayor? Where’s the Governor? They obviously don’t possess the balls or the simple heart or compassion to get involved, which is a shame all by itself.

Kym Worthy’s treatment of Wershe has been mind-numbingly unfair. It’s downright borderline sadomasochistic at this point in my opinion. She should be ashamed of herself.

So should the state’s highest court. It had a chance to make amends for what is obviously a colossal and unjust crucifixion of a man for the sins of others and dropped the ball in a major way.

The scales of justice weighed out against Wershe again in this situation. Maybe one day the system will get it right. Not today though. And it’s sad.