Dallas Scott was reading a western novel in his cell at Marion when he received a packet of legal documents from Sacramento. The papers were a response to the motion he had filed to overturn his 1976 bank-robbery conviction. U.S. Magistrate John Moulds had read Scott’s petition and ruled that the legal issues he raised were worthy of investigation. Moulds had ordered the U.S. attorney’s office and Scott to prepare for a special hearing in Sacramento at which both sides would present their arguments.
Scott was thrilled. Most petitions filed by convicts are quickly rejected by the courts. Moulds’s decision showed that the issues Scott raised were important enough to make the possibility of overturning his conviction real. But there was one bit of information in the packet that Scott didn’t like. Moulds had told Scott to hire an attorney to represent him at the hearing because the court was not willing to bring Scott there. Scott had planned on representing himself. He didn’t trust lawyers, especially any whom he could afford.
A few days later, a guard stopped outside his cell with another packet. A grand jury in Topeka, Kansas, had issued a sixteen-count indictment against Scott, charging him with attempting to smuggle 2.75 grams of heroin worth $500 into Leavenworth. Under the new drug-trafficking laws that Congress had recently passed, Scott faced up to sixty years in prison and four million dollars in fines.
“Get your stuff packed,” a guard told him. “You’re going back to Leavenworth for the trial.”
Scott quickly scribbled a note to his daughter, Star, telling her that he was being transferred. He had not seen Star, who was in her early twenties, for five years, but they corresponded regularly, and in his last letter Scott had been optimistic about his chances of eventually being released.
“I sure hated to tell her that the old man was back in a jackpot again,” he recalled later. “I reckon she knows by now, though, that if there are any sinking ships anywhere around, I will find one and jump aboard.”
By the time Scott finished the letter, a group of guards had assembled outside his cell to escort him down to a waiting van. His pals, John Greschner and Ronnie Bruscino, wished him luck as he walked past their cells.
He was going to need it.