GREENVILLE - A Greenwood man is scheduled for sentencing Wednesday after a federal judge refused to let him take back his guilty plea of nearly three months ago.
Orlando LeWayne "Wayne" Pilcher will appear in U.S. District Court in Greenville at 1 p.m. Wednesday before Judge W. Allen Pepper.
Pilcher pleaded guilty in November 2005 to two counts of distributing more than 50 grams of crack cocaine. In late January, he filed legal documents with the U.S. District Court in Greenville, asking the judge to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea. A sentencing date hadn't been set.
Pilcher said that during the opening day of his trial, "I made a decision on behalf of my family's interferences, which was unexpected and a last-minute decisions."
The U.S. government, represented by assistant U.S. Attorney Dave Sanders, opposed Pilcher's motion.
Pilcher wants to avoid a federal prison sentence of 24 to 30 years, the pleadings filed by Sanders state.
Up until his decision to plead guilty, Sanders asserts that Pilcher was a recalcitrant defendant, refusing to help his court-appointed attorney with a defense. Court documents show that at one point, a judge told Pilcher he needed to cooperate with his attorney.
During the last couple of months, Pilcher has thought about how he gave up his rights, he said, "for a crime that I wasn't intentionally willing to commit."
He has claimed that agents and informants entrapped him. Sanders denied in his legal pleadings that a confidential informant working with Drug Enforcement Administration agents entrapped Pilcher.
In a statement to support the pleadings, Sanders laid out the case against Pilcher. The government alleges that the Greenwood man was one of several who sold crack to a confidential informant in 2004 at the Delta Apartments, where the informant lived. The informant audiotaped one buy on Oct. 14, 2004, during which the government asserts that Pilcher allegedly sold the informant an undetermined amount of crack for $3,300.
Sanders said that a week later, the informant set up another buy, presumably with Pilcher for an undetermined amount of crack.
The informant captured the sale on audio and video, according to Sanders' legal pleadings, when Pilcher allegedly told the informant he needed $3,400 for the sale and an extra $100 because he had meant to charge $3,400 for the buy a week prior.
Pilcher has a prior felony drug conviction. Leflore County Circuit Court records show Pilcher pleaded guilty June 29, 1999, to two counts of sale of cocaine. He was sentenced to 10 years to serve in prison with two years suspended to run concurrently with the first sentence. The state court also ordered Pilcher to serve the two suspended years on post-release supervision.
