Pedro Moreno, now 64, is serving a life term in federal prison for marijuana-related charges.Leo Pfeifer/Ground Floor
On November 19, 1996, Pedro Moreno’s life was upended when federal officials burst into his Texas home, arresting him and his wife, Melba, on charges related to marijuana distribution and taking them away from their three children. Melba was released after 13 years, but her time with her children was cut short: she passed away the following year. Pedro Moreno pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute marijuana and commit money laundering, bracing for a 20-year sentence, but ended up getting life without parole—for a plant sold legally less than 5 miles from his California federal prison cell. Although his four brothers had their life sentences commuted in 2017 by President Obama for the same case, Pedro has not been granted clemency; it’s still not clear why Obama shortened his brothers’ sentences but not his. He has now been behind bars for more than 28 years, he is almost 65.
I spoke to filmmaker Leo Pfeifer about his new documentary This Is Not Life, a short film that tells the story of Pedro Moreno’s daughter Alejandra—8 years old when Pedro was arrested—as she attempts to free her father while there is still time.
Producer Maximilian Stafford shared an exclusive early stream of the film, which is produced by his firm, Ground Floor—watch below before its official release on December 10.
Tell me about the film.
This Is Not Life is about a man serving life in prison for a nonviolent marijuana offense, but it’s really a story about a father and a daughter whose relationship and hope have survived almost three decades of this unimaginably difficult circumstance.
What do you hope to accomplish with the documentary?
I hope that the film can tell these personal stories to speak to this large societal challenge of families that have been broken apart by our criminal justice system and by our sentencing policy. And then on the [other] hand, I really hope that this film brings awareness to Pedro’s case in particular and can help him with his effort to receive clemency.
What led you to Pedro’s case?
Max [Stafford, producer], originally found the story. He was really interested in criminal justice issues and connected with the [CAN-DO Foundation and] was kind of blown away by the profound injustice of that case. Then I came on board, and I was really drawn to it because it’s a tangible story. It’s about a father and a daughter and a family that was broken apart, but it speaks to America’s War on Drugs and it speaks to mass incarceration.
I spoke to Pedro the first time and [he] instantly—he is just such a kind, generous, nice person—opened up to me about his life and his story and his fears and his wants. Then I spoke to Alex, and I think our first conversation was two-plus hours, and I just heard her whole life story. I felt so much for the family, I felt so much for all the other people that are going through similar things, and I felt compelled to translate that thing I was feeling into the documentary.
Why do you think the topic is so important?
We have made a lot of progress as a country, and Pedro is someone who’s been left behind to sit in prison as that progress has happened. There are still so many people sitting in prison because they were sentenced at our height of hysteria around these issues. We live in a country that’s based [on] the idea of freedom and liberty, yet we have this War on Drugs that has not reduced the rate of drug use in our country at all, and has just imprisoned millions of people.
How exactly did he end up with life in prison for a first-time, non-violent marijuana offense?
In the ’80s and ’90s, Pedro was involved with an operation that sold marijuana. The government never alleged that there was any violence involved [or] any other drugs. He pled guilty thinking that he would do 20 years in prison, and he ended up being sentenced to life without parole. And he’s already served 28 years.
Is Pedro’s appeal for clemency especially urgent?
Since she was 8 years old, Alejandra has been deprived of her father, and he’s now in his mid-sixties and living in a very tough environment, in federal prison. And you don’t know how much time they have left to share.
With each new administration, there’s a question of what will their priorities be: Are they going to follow through with their campaign rhetoric? Are they going to grant clemency to Pedro and people like him? And what people forget is that beneath all of that, there is just this woman who needs to be reunited with her father.
How do you think Pedro’s case exemplifies the wider national issue of drug war sentencing?
There’s this extraordinary issue in our country of people being hurt by drugs, and the War on Drugs is not the answer to that. So you look at that one story, and then you look at the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. It makes you stop and think about all of their stories, about all of these people who have been incarcerated. And you think about the lack of efficacy behind this effort for decades: we’ve locked up all these people, we spent billions of dollars on their incarceration. We haven’t reduced the drugs coming into this country.
And people like Pedro, a dedicated father, a family man—he’s serving life without parole because he got caught up in a political moment in the United States where we were giving people these insane sentences that were disproportionate.
I want to speak about Alejandra a bit. How did it affect her life to have both her parents in prison for such a long time?
It fundamentally tore her life apart. She and her siblings basically became orphans, bounced around to different houses. It caused trauma that still has echoes in her life today, and it’s still something that haunts her. Think about living your life with these loving parents, and then one day your door busts down and it’s the federal government and your parents are gone.
Alejandra was 8 years old when her father was taken away, and when we shot the film, her oldest child was 8 years old. So there is sort of this bittersweet triumph [that] she was able to come out of that and start her own family and build a life that she is so proud of, and that her father is so proud of.
But there is this dark spot in her heart, and that is that her father is missing and in prison. He calls her every day, and they have this beautiful relationship, yet it’s limited to 15-minute phone calls.
One of the most powerful aspects of the documentary was how little time Alejandra had with her mother when she was released from prison.
It was so important for us to talk about Alejandra’s mother in the film because she waited over a decade for her to be released from prison. Her mother had all of these health issues, and had to really fight to survive and make it out of that system alive because of how taxing it was. And then she only had a year. Alejandra says, “one Thanksgiving, one Christmas.”
You can imagine, if you haven’t had that since you were eight years old, how beautiful it is to be reconnected—and then to have it ripped away from you when she died. The passing of Alejandra’s mother shows her what could happen each year that her father isn’t released from prison. One of her greatest fears, and one of Pedro’s greatest fears, is that he doesn’t make it out of prison alive and get to be reunited with his family. We spent the time to explore the story of Alejandra’s mother to remind people what will happen if no action is taken on behalf of Pedro.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. This Is Not Life begins streaming publicly December 10 on YouTube.
