My take is that, yes she should go back to jail, but not for long. Some of my reasons are spelled out in the law, and some aren’t.
The point of throwing her in a concrete box in the first place was to make her stop dealing smack. She stopped.
However, she escaped, and she did no time for that.
Some Michigan prosecutor and judge will have to handle this very public case. 32 years later, obviously it won’t be the same D.A. and judge. It would be politically dangerous to just let her walk. After 30 or 45 days, they can quietly let her go home.
America’s prisons are much more crowded than in 1974. Michigan’s are probably more jampacked than most. They will be delighted to boot Ms. LeFevre out the back door to make room for some stabber coming in the front gate.
When you add up the cost of extradition, the new trial, and re-imprisoning the culprit, the cost/benefit ratio doesn’t look good. Still, I’d be astounded if she doesn’t serve more time.
Rick, I don’t think it’s valid to use the price of gasoline to guage inflation. You can find better yardsticks. Still, I agree that $600 worth of smack in those days means she wasn’t some street-corner hawker selling bindles. She was up a notch in the chain, but certainly no kingpin. She supplied dozens, possibly a hundred fifty junkies.
I have no sympathy for her at all. I do feel for her family, since they were not involved and knew nothing about it. (It’s the same sympathy I have for any criminals uninvolved family)
She should go back to her original sentence (minus time served), plus whatever the state of MI gives for breaking out of jail. Parole as deemed appropriate by the relevent authorities.
Yeah, that was a great humanitarian movie about a great humanitarian but if it bugs you to remember a movie about a great humanitarian then I’ll be greatly humanitarian enough to stop using the phrase “a great humanitarian.”
FWIW, this article in The Nation that I got from googling price of heroin 1970 claims that for many years the average price was $10US per ‘dose’ so 60 doses is not that much in the grand scheme of things - and certainly not the 50-150 junkies supplies as mentioned upthread. Not sure how often a junkie uses i a day, but I would think it would be at least 3 or 4 times? so we are looking at enough for 7-10 people for a day or so. Heck, that might be just enough for a weekend if you are planning on a lot of friends over for a party weekend. I know that friends I had back in the late 70s could go through an ounce of weed, 2 or 3 grams coke and serious booze in a weekend and that was for about 15 people.
To me, it sounds more like her BF was the dealer, and he was using her to deliver the junk, not that she was also dealing. Obviously since he got off in 2 years, he was not that big a dealer in the grand scheme of things.
I think she should get 6 months for running, and 10 years probation. She has obviously shown that she rehabilitated herself - she didnt go off and start hanging with the same people, she kept clean. She could have gone underground and stayed with the criminal element.
If you wish. When I mean to include the title, I end it with a comma. The OP wasn’t meant to be gender-loaded. Next time I’ll say “parent”.
Still, I see no bias. Including the title.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that I agreed that there was bias. You had stated that there was “no mention of gender,” and I meant to show how someone might see it otherwise.
Not a problem, really. I simply wish to show that gender wasn’t on my mind when I wrote the OP.
I don’t think that the story would be different if it were about a black male either. Similar stories are pretty rare. Black men aren’t neccessarily ignored by the press. Take the Innocence Project for example.
Though these people were cleared of crimes that got them on death row, and not escapees, they were largely black males and did get a lot of attention.
And Sarah Jane Olson, a white woman, didn’t fair very well after her re-capture. Either time.
Oh, yeah. Cause we just don’t have enough people in jail in the US of A. We’ll be in danger of losing our number one status as the leader in the number of people in jail per capita. If we could just lock EVERYONE up, that would make this country perfect!
Exactly. Her incarceration has no positive social utiliity and great social disruption in the case of their family. (Do you imagine her children will not be heartbroken about her being arrested even though they are grown? They will have learned a new thing about their country, up close and personal: that the state is petty and vengeful and doesn’t give a damn. Is this a lesson we want people to be learning about our government? I wonder how her grandchildren will feel.)
Really, this bit of jurisprudence is so useless and stupid that it boggles the mind that people who can read and write would support it.
I don’t understand exactly whom you are blaming here. Was the state of Michigan wrong to have warrant outstanding on the woman? Were the police officers who arrested her wrong not to ignore the warrant? What exactly should have been changed in the sequence of events leading up to her arrest?
EvillCaptor - So what her grown children learn instead is that you can break the law with impunity, and if you can run away from your punishment, it’s considered a laudable thing as long as you aren’t caught breaking the law again. Because she’s “rehabilitated”.
She’s a felon. She should serve her felonious time. This time in a more secure facility.
A lot of people are saying, “Well, she’s kept out of trouble, so they shouldn’t have gone after her” – or alternatively, that they should go easy on her. With all due respect though, that’s for the courts to decide. It’s easy for us to assume that she’s been a model citizen, but we just don’t know the whole story. Nor would the legal authorities, unless the first get to investigate her whereabouts and behavior over the past few years.
Yes, it is. Just because you’ve changed your ways doesn’t mean that you are no longer accountable for your previous actions.
Besides, it’s up to the courts – not us, and not the arresting officers – to determine if someone has truly changed her ways, and to take that into account in the course of sentencing.
The state of Michigan was wrong to follow up on the outstanding warrants. At some point someone should have investigated this warrant for a 30-year-old crime and said, “Well, this woman has been a model citizen for 30 years. It’s unlikely she’ll be a problem for anyone again. Let’s put our efforts to some more useful endeavors, shall we? Try to incarcerate some people who pose an actual danger to others.” Don’t try to tell me the state doesn’t do this sort of thing all the time. Their resources are limiited when it comes to prosecutions, they have to pick and choose all the time.
This was a really, really, really, really poor way to spend the state’s resources.
Should this be a blanket policy? No investigating warrants over 30 years old? Well there’s some sound public policy. No forseeable problems with that one, nosirree bob. Or were you suggesting the overworked state offices should have halted all of their regular processes to spend extra time and money on this one, single, extra-special case? Good source of resources, were it possible. But that leads us to the second point:
How on earth could they have made such an “investigation” if they had no idea where she was and what she was doing?
Isn’t that for a court to decide?
And finding the woman and bringing her before a court to make that decision is precisely the function of, you guessed it, the WARRANT FOR HER ARREST.
I think you’re really confused about the whole process, EvilCaptor. Your thinking doesn’t extend any further than “it’s all bullshit, man!”
