United States v. Ramsay

• Decision Date: 11 May 2021
• Docket Number: 96-cr-1098 (JSR)
• Citation: 538 F.Supp.3d 407
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, v. Andrew RAMSAY, Defendant.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York

538 F.Supp.3d 407

UNITED STATES of America,

v.Andrew RAMSAY, Defendant.

96-cr-1098 (JSR)

United States District Court, S.D. New York.

Signed May 11, 2021

Christine H. Chung, Assistant United States Attorney, New York, NY, for United States of America.

OPINION & ORDER

JED S. RAKOFF, U.S.D.J.

Thirty years ago, Andrew Ramsay, then age 17, began selling drugs for the "Crotona Avenue Boys," a Bronx gang. The next year, the Crotona Avenue Boys got into a turf war with a rival gang, the "Clay Avenue Boys." A Crotona Avenue leader known as "Bigga Pong" ordered Ramsay and two others to kill the leader of the Clay Avenue Boys, Benjamin Philips.

On September 7, 1992, the three young men went to a Labor Day block party attended by Philips. Armed, they climbed to the second floor of a building with a view of their intended victim, but Philips was surrounded by other partygoers. Nevertheless, they chose to fire into the crowd. They only grazed Philips, but they fatally wounded two bystanders, Paul Speid and Nicole Brown. Brown was pregnant; following an emergency delivery, her baby died as well.

Ramsay was convicted of murder in aid of racketeering, and this Court imposed the then-mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

This case presents an important question. Just last month, eight Justices on the Supreme Court agreed that "youth matters in sentencing." Jones v. Mississippi, ––– U.S. ––––, 141 S.Ct. 1307, 1315, 209 L.Ed.2d 390 (2021) ; see id. at 1316 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting). In the instant case, however, the then-mandatory sentencing regime compelled the Court to sentence Ramsay to life imprisonment, without considering his youth. But Congress now permits courts to grant sentence reductions in "extraordinary and compelling" circumstances. Can an offender's youth, combined with society's evolving understanding of the adolescent brain, constitute such a circumstance?

The Court finds that it can. For that reason, in combination with other reasons unique to Ramsay set forth below, the Court grants Ramsay's motion for a sentence reduction and reduces his sentence from life imprisonment to a term of 360 months’ imprisonment, that is, 30 years.

FACTUAL BACKGROUND

A. Ramsay's Upbringing ¹

Ramsay was born in Jamaica. His twin brother died in infancy, a death his family spoke of for years. Throughout his childhood, Ramsay was shunted from home to home with little youthful guidance. His mother worked multiple jobs and was rarely around. Ramsay does not know who his father is. Over the years, Ramsay's mother introduced Ramsay to five different men, claiming that each was his father. He would sometimes cling to these men as male role models, but, according to Ramsay, they sometimes abused him and, in any case, they all eventually disappeared.

At age 8, Ramsay believed that his mother's then-paramour, Eral Ramsay, was his father. Ramsay would frequently stay with Eral's mother, his putative paternal grandmother, where a housekeeper would watch him. According to Ramsay, the housekeeper molested Ramsay repeatedly for about a year. Ramsay further alleges that during his childhood, various caregivers subjected him to corporal punishment that sometimes turned into severe physical abuse. The housekeeper, for example, hit Ramsay with sticks and belts and made him kneel on grains of rice until they pierced his knees or he passed out. Throughout this time, Ramsay says that the woman whom he believed to be his paternal grandmother knowingly permitted the molestations and the abusive corporal punishment, sometimes participating in the latter herself. Ramsay started to run away, but when he returned, he was abused even more because he had run away.

Ramsay reports a period of relative calm around age nine, when he lived with his maternal grandmother. However, around that time there occurred a spate of especially severe, politically motivated violence in the Dunkirk neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaican, where they lived. Sights of dead bodies and sounds of gunshots were commonplace. Ramsay also reports that he was dropped on his head around this time, though the long-term consequences of that injury, if any, are unknown.

Ramsay's family migrated to the United States when he was 10. Ramsay lived in the Bronx from that time until his arrest. In some ways, Ramsay's life improved in America. He was able to live with his two siblings, who had generally lived elsewhere in Jamaica. However, he was bullied at school and continued to lack emotional support and a male role model. His older sister tried to serve as a mother figure since their mother worked long hours to provide for them, but she was only 12.

Soon after their arrival in the U.S., Ramsay's mother told him that his father was a man named Roy, a retired special education teacher. Ramsay's mother sent Ramsay to stay with Roy during the school week; he would return home on weekends. Roy said that Ramsay had learning and reading disabilities.

Roy has now told Ramsay's mitigation specialist that, at the time Ramsay was living with him during the week, Roy genuinely believed Ramsay was his son because he had had a casual sexual relationship with Ramsay's mother when she was one of his students in Jamaica. Roy said that he accepted Ramsay as his son and tried to take care of him, eventually petitioning for custody of Ramsay, but a paternity test showed that Roy was not Ramsay's biological father.²

Ramsay reports that he felt pressure to be the man of the house, but he was bullied at school and felt unsafe in the neighborhood. A group of African American and Hispanic kids waited to assault him almost every day on his way home from school. When Ramsay was 12, his family moved to a new housing project. Ramsay struggled to relate to and feel safe around his new neighbors.

Ramsay began hanging out with a group of Jamaican men who lived a few blocks from his home. They made him feel safe and socially accepted, but they also asked him to sell drugs. He felt conflicted. Ramsay reports that he sometimes had no choice but to shelter with these men: when he stayed out, his mother would punish him by locking the door, forcing him to spend the night elsewhere. At age 13, a man put a gun in Ramsay's hand and told him to hide it; he saw an implied threat and believed that he could not refuse. Ramsay dropped out of school in ninth grade and became involved in dealing narcotics.

B. The Offense

As developed in the trial before this Court and a jury (held in July and August 1997), Ramsay, in the summer of 1991, told an acquaintance, Orville Walsh, that he had started working with the Crotona Avenue Boys, selling marijuana on consignment for Bigga Pong. Trial Tr., Doc. No. 28, at 72, 77-78. Around a year later, on Labor Day, September 7, 1992, Ramsay, now 18 years old, happened to run into Walsh around 1:00 p.m. Walsh asked Ramsay if he planned to attend a Jamaican concert that day at Roy Wilkins Park in Queens. Id. at 78-80. Ramsay said that he did plan to go, id. at 82, but that he had to go to a Labor Day block party on Clay Avenue first "to take care of some business," id. at 81. Walsh testified that Ramsay said that the "boss g[a]ve him and his friend orders to go take care of Spoony [i.e., Philips] ... [because] Clay Avenue and Crotona Avenue got a beef going on." Id. at 80-81. Walsh understood the "boss" to be Bigga Pong. Id. at 81.

At around 11:30 p.m. that night, at the Clay Avenue block party, three men ran to the second floor of a building across the street from where Philips was standing and fired in his direction. Philips was grazed. Two bystanders, Paul Speid and Nicole Brown, were hit. Both died. Brown was pregnant, and although her baby was delivered, the baby died soon thereafter.

At the time, an eyewitness named Natasha Mattis identified Ramsay as one of the shooters. Right after the incident, she telephoned her friend Janet Gordon and told her about it. Id. at 256, 380. According to Gordon, Mattis "saw the guys. She saw the guys and she knew them, the guys that did it.... I asked her who they were, and she said it was Lizard [i.e., Ramsey], Latchy and Peter." Id. at 429-30. Gordon did not recognize these names, but she testified that Mattis told her that Mattis knew Ramsay because they had attended school together. Gordon urged Mattis to go to the police, id. at 283, and Gordon anonymously called 911, id. at 432.

That night, Ramsay encountered Walsh again and told him about the shootings:

[Ramsay said he] had never got the chance to do what they got to do to [Philips] .... [Philips's] friends was around him, so he couldn't get the chance to do his job. So he said him and his friends fired two shots up in the air, the crowd opens, figured [Philips] would be left by himself. [Philips] end up running, he said, so he had start[ed to] fire shots in the crowd after [Philips] .... [Ramsay] said people got hit but he don't know who was hit.

Id. at 84-85.

Approximately one week after the murders, Mattis and Gordon met with a prosecutor. Id. at 284, 435-36. Two months later, Mattis signed a detailed statement for Detective O'Brien of the New York City Police Department that described the shooting and identified Ramsay as one of the shooters. In January 1993, Mattis testified consistently with that statement to a Bronx County grand jury. Id. at 297.

C. Procedural Background

New York City Police Department officers arrested Ramsay for these murders on January 4, 1993. In November 1996, a further state court proceeding took place. At that proceeding, Mattis recanted. Id. at 296-97. Around that time, on November 21, 1996, Ramsay was transferred to federal custody.

The federal case proceeded to a jury trial. When Mattis was called to testify before this Court, she equivocated. She testified that she saw the men run to the second floor and shoot into the crowd, but claimed she did not remember their identities or even remember identifying Ramsay to the prosecution shortly after the shooting. Mattis's prior written statement to...