Lisa Angelos always carries her brother in the back of her thoughts.

Whenever she finds herself out with friends, sharing a laugh, she says she can't help but think about her brother, Weldon, sitting in prison for 55 years. And her moment of happiness is lost.

For selling three 8-ounce bags of marijuana to an informant working with police, plus testimony from the informant that Angelos had a gun with him at the time, Angelos was sentenced to serve 55 years under a federal minimum-mandatory law. In his appeal, his lawyers are claiming that the lengthy sentence constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for the crime committed.

Now Weldon Angelos' fate stands one last hope — the U.S. Supreme Court. His family already faced disappointment when in January the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the sentence for the 26-year-old aspiring rap producer and father of two. When she received the news of the appellate decision, Lisa Angelos said she pulled over on the highway and threw up in her car, she was so emotionally upset.

Lisa Angelos knows that if the Supreme Court refuses to hear her brother's case, it's all over. "I've been scared to death," she said.

In her Sandy home, Lisa keeps a room ready with his things in it, pending her brother's return. It's her way of keeping hope. "I keep seeing him coming home," she said.

In the corner are a pair of his basketball shoes and his ball. On the wall is a montage of photos with Weldon Angelos and his two boys, recording some of the happier family moments. There are also posters of two of the rap albums that he produced, one with the help of rap star Snoop Dogg.

Some of the songs Angelos wrote before his arrest talk about suspicion of police and the justice system as well as turning one's life around. Among the lyrics: "Set us free without us beggin' please, and that's what we looking for, from the trailer parks to the streets, where babies crying mama feed us, don't leave us, get a job and treat us, can American be as good as it's promised by its leaders, to keep us hoping, look at us joking, now our future's stolen . . . ."

Lisa Angelos said Weldon's fellow inmates at the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, Calif., don't believe him when he tells them his sentence. "When he tells people there, nobody believes him. He actually has to pull (newspaper) articles and show them" because many people think he means 55 months, not years.

He admits that dealing marijuana was a mistake, she says, but at the time of his arrest, Lisa Angelos insists, her brother was trying to turn his life around for himself and his kids.

Federal prosecutors paint a very different picture of Angelos as a mid- to high-level drug dealer.

"Weldon Angelos is no choirboy," Paul Warner, the former U.S. attorney for Utah, said last January after the 10th Circuit ruling.

Lisa Angelos says no one should be sent away for most of his life while other more serious offenders are let go. "He's watching rapists walk out of there and murderers walk out of there, and he's asking, 'Why am I here?' " she said.

At the age of 78, Angelos' father, James Angelos, said it's hard for him to think that when he dies, his son will be in prison.

"I want him out, whether I'm alive or dead," James Angelos said.

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E-mail: gfattah@desnews.com