Should Michigan be willing to forgive and forget long-ago drug crime?
A new drug sentencing story from Michigan sounds like the script of a Lifetime TV movie. Here are the basics from this piece in The Saginaw News:
A southern California family is standing by the wife and mother who lived under a false name and with a colossal secret: Susan M. LeFevre escaped from a Plymouth prison 32 years ago. But Michigan authorities are painting a different picture from LeFevre’s account that her drug involvement was minor and she jumped a barbed wire fence to escape from prison out of fear for her safety.
The former Thomas Township resident, arrested at 19 for taking $600 from an undercover officer during a heroin drug sting in 1974, served about one year of a 10- to 20-year sentence for violating drug laws and conspiring to commit that crime when she walked away from the Robert Scott Correctional Facility at 21. Her husband of 23 years, Alan Walsh, said his family was blindsided and grief-stricken by the revelation that Marie Day, the woman he fell in love with and who bore his three children, had hidden a criminal past….
LeFevre, a 1973 Arthur Hill High School graduate, received her sentence Feb. 27, 1975. On Feb. 2, 1976, she walked away from prison, saying she threw a coat over a barbed wire fence and climbed into a waiting vehicle where her grandfather and another relative were saying the rosary. LeFevre headed for California and used a Social Security number belonging to someone who died in 1981, a number she says she made up, said Steve Jurman, the federal Marshal who arrested her. She obtained a California driver’s license using a false date of birth but didn’t renew it after it expired in 1999.
Her 32 years of freedom ended April 24, when federal marshals acting on an anonymous tip from Michigan arrested her at her home in Del Mar. Police described her home as a mansion in Carmel Valley, where she lived with her husband, two daughters and a son — 15, 20 and 22.
“I’ve heard her story that she just happened to be with a person who was selling heroin,” said Russ Marlan, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections. “The file we have is very different.” LeFevre’s crimes likely caused many and serious ripples in the criminal underworld, he said. A state trooper testified LeFevre was a ringleader of a drug-trafficking operation, Marlan said.
“She had people working for her. She was making a large profit,” Marlan said. “She wore nice clothing and rented an apartment. When she was arrested, she had $600 in cash, paraphernalia for cutting heroin, and photographs that proved she was acquainted with people higher up in the Saginaw drug world. When she was sentenced to do 10 to 20 years for a person with no prior history… those things don’t mesh with someone (who was a small time drug dealer). The state police that did the investigation estimated she was making $2,000 a week when she was arrested. That’s $104,000 a year. That’s good money now, imagine what it was in 1974.”
This related story has a corrections official suggesting that she would have to serve at least 5+ years on her original conviction and that a sentencing judge might tack on an additional prison term for escape. The piece also notes, however, that Michigan Governor “Jennifer M. Granholm has the power to grant clemency.” This case should be an interesting one to watch in the days and weeks ahead.
UPDATE: This new article provides more details about LeFevre’s life and crimes in the 1970s, and it concludes with this notable suggestion from the Michigan prosecutor in charge of a drug task force at the time she was originally sentenced:
If he were prosecutor today, said Denton [who was Saginaw County’s prosecutor in charge during the 1970s], he wouldn’t put LeFevre back in prison. Instead, he would allow her to withdraw her plea, have her replead to the same charges, then sentence her under the new Michigan guidelines, which would factor in a prior record, the severity of the crime and what she has done with her life. “I’d give her probation and let her go back and be with her family in California.”