This is Planet Money from NPR.

Alexis Nicholson has this picture from when she was eight years old.

So yeah, this picture means a lot to me. I've always held on to it even though she's a piece of paper from Jackie Cheese.

It's a picture from her eighth birthday party. There were a lot of people there, but this picture is special to Alexis because it's just her and her dad read J.

They're in a photo booth and their heads are up against each other smiling. We's at Jackie Cheese and I don't really it's hard to talk about it, but Alexis is Reggie's only daughter.

She's 25 years old now and she got this picture printed on a pink sweatshirt that she's wearing.

I've always been a daddy's girl, you know what I mean? So I've always been close to him even though he's always been far away.

She could say her dad was arrested not too long after that birthday party when he was just 25 years old.

According to transcripts, the police had shown up at Reggie's house in Oklahoma City because his home burglary alarm had gone off.

Reggie wasn't home for it, but when he got there his door was left wide open and police were waiting outside.

They had responded to the alarm and Reggie told the cops they could go in, look around.

And while they were looking around, they found a shoebox with some drugs, money and a gun inside.

And they arrested Reggie.

I do remember when I got told my grandma picked me up from school and she was just like, they got you dead.

And I knew she was talking about what I didn't want to believe in. So I asked her, I said, who has the police do?

The police had found 635 grams of crack cocaine in the shoebox, which is a decent amount.

It would be like two soda cans worth of crack, a little over a pound, enough to be considered trafficking. This was in 2003.

Now, if you were caught with this exact amount of drugs today in Oklahoma, the most prison time you could get is 20 years.

So a long time, but the laws were much harsher back then.

Especially because Reggie had been caught with drugs twice before. And that combination, two drug convictions, plus a trafficking conviction, it carried one sentence and one sentence only.

The rest of your life at the trial, the prosecutor told the jury that life meant they could give Reggie a million years if they wanted.

Mercy is for people who don't commit one crime after another, the prosecutor said.

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