In 1986, the War on Drugs took a wrong turn down a dark alley and condemned large numbers of people to life in prison. Congress mandated the creation of federal sentencing guidelines from which judges could choose in making their decisions on conspiracy cases involving drug crimes. What Congress and the judiciary didn’t consider when passing these laws were the individuals—including mothers and fathers—who would be implicated for simply existing on the periphery of the criminal world. These individuals form a major part of those who are now spending the rest of their days away from their families, contemplating crimes they didn’t commit.

This is what happened to one mother, whose story Melissa Mummert presents in her documentary, Perversion of Justice. Mummert first met Hamedah Hasan, a prisoner, while interning at a federal prison for women. Mummert’s job involved listening to the stories of incarcerated women. What she learned from them shocked her enough to make this film. Most of the women in the prison were serving sentences ranging from ten years to life for minor involvement in drug selling operations.

Hamedah had one daughter and was escaping an abusive relationship with her child’s father when she decided to move to Omaha, Nebraska to live with her cousins and rebuild her life. She stayed out of her cousins’ business—dealing crack cocaine—except for several times she held their drugs or aided them by wiring money through Western Union. After spending time considering her situation, she left her cousins and went back home, where she joined the welfare-to-work program and began to rehabilitate herself successfully—until the government arrested her cousins back in Omaha.

Although Hamedah was no longer anywhere near Omaha, she had held her cousins’ drugs and wired money for them the previous year. The federal government charged Hamedah with one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, five counts of distribution and possession, one count each of interstate travel and aid in racketeering, and use of a communication facility in furtherance of conspiracy. “In furtherance,” was a key concept in her sentencing; this makes family members like Hamedah guilty of the same criminal acts as those who actively perpetrate them. In Perversion of Justice, Mummert spells out the details of conspiracy law for her audience, using a series of interviews with advocacy lawyers, criminal justice professionals, Hamedah and her three children, and the George Bush-appointed federal judge who sentences her to life in jail. The judge used the mandatory sentence matrix in determining Hamedah’s fate, disclosing in an interview that mandated laws compelled him to do so, but admitting that the conclusion was “the most grotesque perversion of justice I can think of.”

Hamedah received two life sentences, two twenty-year sentences, two forty-year sentences, a five-year, and a four-year sentence for each charge. She left her three children—one was four years old at the time—with her parents. They can only afford to visit her once a year.

Mummert and Hamedah go through appeals, a sentence reduction inspiring hope, and a nightmare prosecution in which the conclusion is rigidly determined by federal orders and justice for a specific individual case is not an option

Mummert’s choice of Hamedah as a case study is effective. Here is a woman who continues to parent her daughters with nighttime phone calls, and who actively searches for any tools that a democratic justice system can offer in making her appeal. Her three daughters walk the streets—and later, Capitol Hill—to attempt to extend their mother’s short-lived reprieve, gathering signatures from neighbors and knocking on Congress members’ doors.

In January 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that federal sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional—but unfortunately, not retroactively so. In spite of this, Hamedah and Perversion of Justice leave us with a courageous and optimistic outlook: that each of us can use action, as Hamedah does, to struggle for rights within a system hopefully “not stacked against our democracy.”