Judge finds wiggle room, sends case back for re-sentencing

PALMER — A state appeals court has sent a convicted methamphetamine cook’s case back to a Palmer judge for re-sentencing.

Billyjack Wiglesworth was convicted in November 2008 of one count of burglary and six of drug misconduct. The case dates back to 2007 when Wiglesworth and three confederates first tried unsuccessfully to cook meth on a Little Susitna River beach in Houston and then successfully cooked and consumed the drug in a cabin in Willow.

At trial, Wiglesworth was fingered as the only person in the party who knew the process for extracting the drug from cold medicine tablets. In February 2009, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the bulk of that time — 14 years — tied to the drug misconduct charges.

On appeal, Wiglesworth raised three major points — that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove he’d committed burglary, that the sentence for burglary should merge with the sentence for manufacturing meth and that those six counts of drug misconduct should have been merged into a single sentence.

Appeals court judge David Mannheimer wrote in the court’s decision that the first two claims had no merit but the third did.

The evidence of the burglary — a pried-open door hasp and testimony from one of his co-conspirators saying no one had permission to be in the cabin — was sufficient, Mannheimer wrote in the decision, which was handed down Friday. As for merging the burglary and drug misconduct charges, the judge cited case law to make short work of that claim. By definition, burglary is the act of entering a building without permission to commit a crime. Previous appeals in other cases have resulted in rulings saying a separate sentence for the burglary and the motivating crime were proper, Mannheimer wrote.

The third claim the court found more difficult and, in the end, sided with Wiglesworth.

“We conclude that a person engaged in a single act of manufacturing methamphetamine is guilty of only one count of second-degree controlled substance misconduct, even though the defendant might, in the process, manufacture or possess two or more immediate precursor chemicals, or might possess two or more listed chemicals,” Mannheimer wrote.

The methamphetamine manufacturing process includes a number of steps and a number of chemicals. The law says that if someone possesses any chemical on a certain legally defined list — phosphorus, iodine, acetone or other so-called “listed chemicals” — with the intent of using them to make drugs, the penalty is the same as if the person had actually made the drugs. The same goes for possession of meth precursors, chemicals produced at different stages in the manufacturing process.

But if a person is allowed to be charged with each individual chemical, Mannheimer wrote, someone manufacturing meth might wind up facing a dozen or more felonies if law enforcement interrupted the process, whereas a successful cook might wind up with just one felony. The court found that problematic.

“This result appears to be illogical and unsupported by any social policy,” Mannheimer wrote.

In explaining the ruling, Mannheimer used two examples of the way the laws are written in Alaska: Someone who points a gun at multiple people in one incident is charged with multiple assault counts. Someone who breaks into a home and steals a bunch of stuff belonging to many different people is charged with just one theft count.

Methamphetamine manufacturing, Mannheimer wrote, is closer to that burglary example than to the assault example, in that the law was written to focus on the crime rather than its victims.

The ruling sends the case back to the trial judge, Superior Court Judge Vanessa White, for the charges to be merged and a new sentence to be decided.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.