A New York federal judge freed a man who spent 27 years behind bars after he initially sentenced the convicted robber to five life terms.
U.S. District Judge Frederic Block reduced Walter Johnson’s sentence to time served plus three years of supervised release. Johnson was released on Thursday from a federal prison in Otisville, nearly a two-hour drive northwest of Brooklyn, where Johnson is from.
Johnson, who once had the street name “King Tut,” served nearly three decades in prison on robbery and drug charges. He was the only person ever sentenced to mandatory life in prison out of the Eastern District of New York, which covers Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, under a federal statute known as the Three Strikes law, which targets repeat offenders, according to Mia Eisner-Grynberg, deputy attorney-in-charge of Federal Defenders of New York, which represented Johnson…