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A law school student in Washington was leading a double life while studying and helping inmates at a jail in D.C., according to The Washington Post. Marc Gersen’s double life involved running a methamphetamine ring using social networking. Gersen, 31, was sentenced on Thursday in federal court to four years in prison. He pled guilty to selling wholesale quantities of meth.
Gersen was arrested over a year ago outside a hotel in Northwest Washington. When he was arrested, Gersen was in his second year as a law student at Georgetown and held a 3.48 GPA. He was also addicted to meth.
United States District Judge Reggie B. Walton presided over the sentencing. He said, “Somebody as intelligent as you are had to have known. It’s just perplexing.”
Walton asked Gersen how he can trust that Gersen will not relapse following the completion of his sentence. Gersen said, “How can you or I be sure that things won’t change in the future? I can’t tell you that temptations won’t come,” he said. “But when they do, I will do what I need to do to make sure I stay on the right path.”
Court documents contain letters written to the judge by Gersen’s former friends, classmates, professors, family members and a campus rabbi. Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor of Gersen, wrote the following:
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“His law school performance — remarkable under any circumstances — is truly incredible given the other things going on in his life. The short of it is that Marc is an extraordinary young man who has made some extraordinary mistakes.”
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Magdelena Acevdo and Patricia Stewart wrote: “What emerges from accounts of his fellow drug dealers, his customers and his own words, is of a drug dealer who believed that because of his intellectual ability, he was able to outwit law enforcement and avoid detection.”
Gersen’s parents, Robin and Lenny Gersen, also wrote a letter to the judge on their son’s behalf. In part, it said, “Marc had never failed at anything academic before, and had an emotional breakdown. I tried to reach out to him, but Marc didn’t talk to us about his problems until it was too late. . . . He had already gotten involved with drugs. Our family has not been the same since.”
When he was arrested in December of 2011, it was not the first time Gersen was taken into custody. In 2009, he was arrested in California on felony possession of ecstasy. He pled no contest to the charge. In 2010, Gersen was charged with drug possession in San Francisco.
