Rick Wershe is still in prison for possession of 17 pounds of cocaine when he was seventeen.
Admittedly, he was a drug dealer, but that's not the story. The DEA (among other local and federal law enforcement agencies) used him as an informant, but when he started revealing corruption in the Detroit Police and city government, the DPD retaliated.
[His attorney] got affidavits from three of the “leather, furs, and gold” crowd who said they had been paid $20 a piece by police to show up. Wershe’s defense found many such curious incidents.
An officer in Wershe's case admitting to using false information to get warrants, according to a 1995 book by William Adler. FBI wiretap recordings also revealed another officer admitting to giving perjured testimony against Wershe.
According to a 2003 Detroit News article, a key witness at Wershe’s trial, who police testified had disappeared because he feared for his life, later submitted a statement to one of Wershe’s lawyers claiming he was never called to testify and his earlier testimony had been coerced.
After four days of deliberation, the jurors announced they were deadlocked, but the judge refused to accept a hung jury. The next time the jury came back, it found Wershe guilty.
They changed the 650-lifer law that put him away, but every time he's up for parole something happens:
In 2012, the Michigan State Parole Board canceled a planned pre-parole hearing for Wershe.
“[The prosecutor] opposes his release on parole because he has not demonstrated while he has been incarcerated that he can be a productive law abiding member of society,” the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office said in an email.
Which is an interesting argument, given who else the state of Michigan considers rehabilitated.
The Curry brothers are out of prison. The two Miami dealers who supplied Wershe are out too. So is Frank Lee Usher, who was convicted in 1979 of murdering two men and a woman outside of a Detroit club and then chopping off their heads and hands. His sentence was later overturned, and he served several more years on other charges.