Tracey Cowan
Tracey Cowan (Photo: Michigan Department of Corrections)
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has commuted the prison term of Tracey Cowan, 60, who was sentenced in Oakland County on drug and firearms charges in 2003, WXYZ reports.
Richard Wershe Jr., aka "White Boy Rick, advocated for her release, as did state Rep. Tenisha Yancey of Harper Woods and others. She's expected to be released in the next 30 to 60 days after serving nearly 20 years.
“We tend to over-punish people," Wershe tells WXYZ's Simon Shaykhet. "Someone involved in a nonviolent crime, a woman that never committed an act of violence in her life to spend decades in prison, away from her children. I just have a problem with that."
In 2003, an Oakland County judge sentenced Cowan to 16 to 40 years on cocaine charges, with additional time for marijuana trafficking and firearms.
State Rep. Tenisha Yancey
Yancey tells Deadline Detroit that Cowan got in trouble for dating a drug dealer who stored illegal narcotics where she lived on Appoline Street in Northwest Detroit. There's no evidence she was trafficking or knew about the drugs, the lawmaker says. The boyfriend, Rory Jones, a member of the Puritan Avenue Boys Crew, was charged with drug trafficking and served about 12 years.
When women date drug dealers, Yancey says, it's not "unusual to turn the other eye; one for lifestyle, two for safety."
Cowan was an ideal inmate who mentored and tutored younger prisoners, worked as a library clerk and helped do legal research, Yancey said. She has taken University of Michigan courses.
"She's had an exemplary record," Yancey said of Cowan's time in prison. "I'm very grateful the governor commuted the sentence."
Richard ("Maserati Rick") Carter and Tracy Cowan (Photo: The Gangster Report)
Before dating the man who she got in trouble with, Cowan had a relationship and two children with Richard (Maserati Rick) Carter, one of Detroit's infamous drug traffickers. He was shot in 1988 in front of his car wash on Seven Mile and Mansfield by a rival dealer. While in the hospital, he was fatally shot by a hitman dressed in doctor’s scrubs.
Wershe, who served about 32 years in prison for drug trafficking and other offenses, was on the streets at the same time as Maserati Rick and they knew each other.
Cowan, who is a grandmother and about to be a great-grandmother told Shaykhet by phone from the Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti:
“My heart won’t stop beating fast. Just thinking about what I’ve been waiting for, for a long time.”
