By Ramone Tarnaski

Fate Winslow said the first thing he wanted to do when he returned to Shreveport eat a fried chicken at Popeye's. “I was so happy to get out of there”, Winslow told WWL-TV as he drove home after his prison stint. The next stop was the most important, he said, when he saw his four children and three grandchildren again, who thought they would never see him as a free man again.

“I never thought this could happen to me, but I'm just so grateful for my family, my wife and my children and all my grandchildren”, he said.

Winslow was sentenced to life in prison without parole for distributing marijuana to multiple offenders. Winslow was homeless when an undercover cop asked him if he knew where to buy marijuana. Winslow borrowed a bike and returned with two small bags of weed.

The undercover officer gave Winslow $5 and some food for his efforts, as well as $20 for himself, according to court documents.

The other inmates couldn't believe it, and a series of other articles and two documentaries about Winslow's story were printed.

In a Rolling Stone article that highlighted Winslow's case, the magazine wrote that the dealer, who was white, was registered by officials as having a $20 bill in his possession.”He received an obscene and excessive sentence in the circumstances of his crime, and today we are correcting this unconstitutional and inhumane punishment. There are hundreds of people serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes in Louisiana”, Park said. Park was in Angola to greet Winslow as he walked through the prison's main gate. He has already been convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of dangerous assault with a firearm.

He said that when he returned he had a landscaping job, which he had been looking forward to for a year and a half.