He was the one who broke the news to my prosecutor, who didn't know about my release until Ernie called him for a quote. He wasn't happy about it either.

One thing I would like for you to emphasize is that Germany has worn the white hat throughtout this entire sage/nightmare. Germany does not have the conspiracy statute and they do not allow hearsay testimony into the courtroom, which is why I never would have been indicted if I had lived in Germany. But because I live in the U.S. my life was destroyed, thanks to the war on drugs, which is being peddled and justified as a war that is supposed to save lives. From my perspective, the opposite is true. I have no history of drug addiction or abuse, yet my life was claimed and I was subjected to over 9 years of suffering in hell thanks to the WAR, not drugs.

Anyway, enough about that. Yes, you may drop the Madam X, and use the name Amy Ralston, as I dropped Pofahl, however, if you write about my case you may need to refer to me by my married name, since it relates to Sandy's case, for clarity. All the media keeps referring to me as Pofahl, and then I get letters asked me why I have kept his name if he was such a loser/betrayer. WEll, while in prison, I didn't have a choice. They won't let us change our name, although I'm legally "Ralston" now.

In response to your question about the manuscript. Yes, I would like it published in German. I don't think that Ott has a copy as it was /is very bulky and he made his corrections and returned it to me for me to then edit his edit by incorporating his corrections/ suggestions or whatever. AS you know writing a book is a huge task, especially for someone like me who has never written one, although it gave me great satisfaction for three years when I initially wrote it in prison. Now, it needs a final polish and my boyfriend has a degree in journalism and he is a very talented writer. I like what I've done, but it does need work. Mark (my boyfriend) is coming to Ark. in one week and we are going to work on getting him moved here so we can work on it together. I already have someone in L.A. who wants to handle the movie rights, but I'm not ready for that as I want the book completed first. As soon as I can I will try to get you a copy or some sample chapters. It is a GREAT story, and now it is a much better story, with a happy ending. I hope it will be done soon.

Didn't mean to make this so long, but I'm having so much fun with this stuff. I will stay in touch and you do the same.

Amy Ralston!!!!
Free at last.

P.S. One last thing. I was going to title the book The XTC Conspiracy, but Mark prefers The Silent Lamb. Any suggestions?

From the latest edition of Glamour Magazine:

DON'T DO THIS TO YOURSELF, AMY," Amy Ralston Pofahl silently cautioned on July 7 as she made her way across the bleak prison compound to her case manager's office. They probably just want to talk to you about something stupid, she thought. She tried to suppress any hopeful notion that she might be getting positive news regarding her lengthy sentence. Indeed, the last time Ralston (she no longer uses her married name) was abruptly summoned to a case manager's office at the FCI Dublin correctional facility outside of Oakland, California, the medium security prison where she'd spent the previous nine years of her life, was Christmas Eve 1999, a traditional time for presidential pardons and clemencies to be granted. Ralston, now 40, a willowy 5'9" blond with the peaceful beauty of Joni Mitchell, was serving a 24-year sentence, without the possibility of parole, for a first-time drug offense. She'd been convicted of a crime with a harsh mandatory sentence; the judge had no choice but to impose it. Since losing her appeal three years earlier, Ralston had been pouring all her energy into organizing a massive letter-writing campaign to government officials.

Every day she spent hours in the prisons legal library, fighting for use of one of the eight often broken typewriters shared by more than 900 inmates. Ralston had enlisted members of Congress from Hawaii to Maryland to write to federal pardons attorney Roger C. Adams in Washington and to President Clinton on her behalf. Her other legal options exhausted, Ralston knew an executive clemency was her last hope of freedom before turning 52. So when she was ordered to report to the case manager's office last Christmas Eve, she could practically taste the freedom she thought she was about to be granted. "I really was convinced it was going to happen."

Instead, Ralston found that her single-minded hopes had painted a cruel mirage. The case manager had called her in to see a woman from the prison commissary, who wanted only to discuss payment for some clay, Ralston had requested, she'd taken up ceramics to pass the time. Back in her cell, where no one could see her, Ralston collapsed crying. "I was so angry with God because I thought I was the butt of this huge cosmic joke ... having my hopes get so close and then this," she recalls. So Ralston was understandably reticent six months later, on July 7 of this year, as she reported to a different case manager, one she'd been friendly with for some time, who had been frantically looking for her all morning. (Ralston had been at the infirmary getting a regular checkup.) But this time, Ralston's dream was coming true. "My case manager just looked at me, she's a real nice lady, and said, 'You're going home'. There's this chair there, and I collapsed, I just lost it. I cried, but not as much as I thought I would because I was so excited."

So were Ralston's many supporters, who had been campaigning hard for her release. After an article about the injustice of her case appeared in the June 1999 issue of Glamour, Ralston became the poster girl for the push to reform harsh federal mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws. Enacted in the late eighties in an attempt to quell the nations crack epidemic, the laws were meant to take drug dealers and kingpins out of business and off the streets by beefing up existing sentences with additional mandatory sentences ranging from one year for dealing in a drug-free school zone to 30 years for using a machine gun during the commission of a crime. Judges are allowed almost no leeway, not even in cases involving small amounts of narcotics. Under the conspiracy statutes of these same laws, a person found guilty of committing just one overt act in a drug conspiracy, something as innocent as taking a phone message for a friend who turns out to be a drug dealer, could be sentenced as if she were the leader in the entire operation. It's easy to see today how the mandatory drug laws have failed. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in 1999 that of the more than 20,000 drug sentences in 1998, only 41 were for actual ringleaders, as defined by the so-called "kingpin statute." Too many of the rest of the sentences were for women like Ralston.

The Biggest Mistake of Her Life

When she was 24, Amy Ralston, a part-time model and office temp in Dallas who'd been raised on a farm in Arkansas, met and, one year later, married Sandy Pofahl, a charismatic, wealthy businessman and Stanford University Law School graduate. Only after they had been separated for a year and herhusband was arrested in 1989 did she learn that he was the mastermind of a syndicate that made and distributed the illegal drug Ecstasy. And that's when she broke the law: To help Sandy make bail when he was in jail, she helped him recover some of his drug profits, under his direction, by removing the cash from various stashes around town. "I really was stupid," she says. "I just threw caution to the wind and thought, Whatever needs to be done I will do it." Ralston had no idea that under the tough Federal conspiracy statutes, she would be considered as guilty as if she were the organization's linchpin. Since her husbands operations were so vast, the judge had no choice but to sentence her to 24 years with no chance of parole, his hands, Ralston recalls him saying, were tied. The kicker: The only way she or any other minor player m a drug crime could possibly bargain for a reduced sentence was by providing the government with information on others involved in the conspiracy.

Ralston had been kept in the dark about her husband's dealings and didn't want to tell what little she knew about her husband just to help herself. People like her, most often the wives and girlfriends of the major dealers, know so little about the operations that even if they are willing to inform on others, they have no useful information to bargain with, whereas the bigger players can always sell out the minor players Which is exactly what Sandy Pofahl did: He told all, implicating his wife and several of his associates, and served only four years behind bars in Germany (where he was arrested), while his wife got 24 for refusing to incriminate him.

While there was no love lost between Amy and Sandy, she still says, "I can't sell someone out in order to save my own suffering. It's not how I was raised." Ralston does not paint herself as an angel -- she admits what she did was wrong. "But I think the sentences were unfair. I should have gotten his, and he should have gotten mine." Even though the sentence was so dearly disproportionate to her crime, consider that the average sentence for sexual assault is 2.6 years, she stood scant chance of being released.

The Clinton administration has been criticized for its stinginess in handing out clemencies, in 1999, Clinton granted only 12 out of more than 1,000 waiting for his review. Fortunately, he came to agree that Ralston's sentence was unfair and granted clemency to her and to three other women and one man with similar histories. "I am so, so grateful," says Ralston, cozily hugging her knees on her parents' flowered couch in Charleston, Arkansas, just over a week after her release. "Every day is like Christmas, New Year's and my birthday rolled into one. I'm still fascinated by being free, and I hope to some degree I don't lose touch with that."

Amy's Lost Decade As beautiful as she looks now, her face glow-ing with the joy of freedom, it's hard not to notice the more energetic, more radiant version of Ralston that smiles in eighties makeup and hair in the pre-arrest snapshots she spreads out on the coffee table. "When I was arrested, I was on the cusp of turning 31," she says haltingly. "I feel like I've aged so much and that I've lost a whole decade of my most productive years, and not just to have children. By the time you're 30 you figure out what your strengths are and you want to achieve things," she explains ruefully. "I look at these pictures, and I'm like, Oh, 0K. I lost that period, that priceless pocket of my life. I've got to make up for it. Ralston, dressed in a flowered skirt that was in storage while she was in prison, tucked away for so long that it's back in style, fingers a beaded pouch she wears around her neck. It was made by Lau Ching Chin, one of Ralston's two room-mates for about five years in her 8 by 11 foot cell, to raise money to support Chin's children (Ralston says they're now 14, 15 and17) on the outside. "Her case is even more egregious than mine," says Ralston. Chin, who is Chi-nese and in her early forties, simply translated a phone call for her drug dealer boyfriend, who spoke no English. "[For that] she got 17 years. Her prosecutor said that if they trusted her enough to interpret this phone, then surely she must have been trusted enough in this organization to have done other calls," Ralston explains. Yet like Ralston, Chin was sentenced as if she'd been the leader.

Eric Sterling is an attorney who as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee was a principal aide in developing the mandatory minimum drug-sentencing laws back in 1986 and coauthored the mandatory drug sentencing laws. Now he works full time as the president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation to get them repealed. He explains that in their zeal to curb the nations drug problem, legislators drafted the laws to be as broad and inclusive as possible so that they could go back to their constituents and say they put a large number of people behind bars. But they went too far. "It was cuckoo," Sterling admits now. "And it's shocking to see how long the sentences are and how small the number is of major traffickers who have been incarcerated." Sterling is encouraged by President Clintons granting of clemency to Ralston and the four others and hopes that his action signals a shift in the political winds when it comes to more reasonable sentences for drug offenders. "It's hard to say what will happed' when a new president is elected, explains Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization on criminal justice policy. "Neither Bush nor Gore has expressed a good deal of concern about mandatory sentencing." When contacted by Glamour, neither of the two candidates would comment on the Ralston case specifically. As for the laws in general, they both offered a noncomment: "He supports as a general rule tougher sentencing requirements, but he also believes it is important to be very thoughtful and careful about how to apply them," says Gore campaign spokesman Jano Cabrera. Bush has taken even less of a stance: "When he is president, Governor Bush will approach pardons on a case-by-case basis," says Ray Sullivan of the Bush campaign.

There is a bill, sponsored by Democratic representative Maxine Waters of California, to repeal these laws, but neither Sterling nor Mauer sees it passing in the current Con-gress. Politicians of any stripe are loath to appear soft on drugs, especially in an election year. "It's a bipartisan madness--most members of Congress are addicted to political rhetoric around drugs," Sterling explains. "Because the mike and the cameras are on, they want to talk tough."

Freedom Campaign
Luckily for Ralston, not all politicians were afraid to get behind her cause. Representa-tives Barbara Lee of California, Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas and Patsy Mink of Hawaii, all Democrats, were three of the most outspoken, writing numerous letters to the President and urging their colleagues to do the same. Former Arkansas