Far too often those in the criminal justice system offer the same mantra: “our job is to rehabilitate people.” But far too often that claim is simply untrue. Take, for example, the case of Nicole Defontes, which was highlighted in the Daily Business News two weeks ago.
Ms. Defontes was sentenced to four and half years in prison for her participation in a cocaine deal with her former boyfriend. Upon entering prison, Defontes made a commitment to rehabilitation—she graduated from both high school and college and qualified for a Bureau of Prisons drug rehabilitation program that allowed to her to receive a year off her prison sentence, only if she met strict requirements. Once Defontes was relocated from prison to a federal half-way house, she was hired at a West Palm Beach drug and alcohol counseling center, and quickly rose from “laundry detail to an administrative position.” By all accounts, Defontes was leading a productive law abiding life and meeting the obligations imposed upon her through supervision at the half-way house.
But none of that mattered to the powers that be at the Bureau of Prisons.
The Bureau of Prisons summoned Defontes to a halfway house Aug. 10, 2009, and invited her in the back “for a talk.” A law enforcement officer lunged from behind a door and arrested her. She found herself at the
“I kept asking for my lawyer,” Defontes said. “I couldn’t believe it. I was totally overwhelmed.”
When a guard told her she had failed a drug test, Defontes asked to see the results and for a hair test—the most reliable drug test—at her own expense. She figured a poppy-seed bagel she had eaten before a July drug test may have been the culprit. Opiates, such as heroin, are derived from the poppy flower.
Instead, she claimed the Bureau of Prisons retaliated by putting her in solitary confinement for 17 days after her attorney contacted officials at the FDC.
Defontes ended up being tried twice in administrative hearings, once in absentia and both times without representation, Cooke found. Officials were determined she go back to prison for 1½ more years.
“I kept on saying, ‘Am I in America?’” the Stuart woman said. “I had a car, a nice job, a place to live. And then suddenly I disappeared. Nobody knew where I was.”
Fortunately for Defontes, the drug rehabilitation center contacted the law firm of Holland & Knight and attorneys Daniel Fridman of Holland and David Markus of Markus & Markus agreed to represent her.
The attorneys met stiff opposition from the U.S. Attorney’s office and the Bureau of Prisons, both of whom would not turn over the lab report from the drug test. “They basically told us, ‘You have to sue us,’” Fridman said. Litigation ensued, with the attorneys filing a petition for writ of habeas corpus.
District Court Judge Marcia G. Cooke agreed to take a closer look at the drug test and the circumstances surrounding Defontes custody by the Bureau of Prisons. The Court concluded that:
In this case the Bureau of Prisons wrongfully convicted Ms. Defontes twice, and if not for the efforts of her attorney, the Bureau of Prisons would have wrongfully deprived her of her earned good-time credits and would have wrongfully detained her beyond the time when she rightfully should have been released-all because the Bureau of Prisons failed to follow its own policies, and further failed to discover its own mistake.
Defontes v. Rathman et al., 2010 WL 3894045 *3 (S.D.Fla. 2010). The Court went on to fashion an order taking Defontes out of the Bureau of Prisons’ custody and into the Probation Office in order to “prevent continued or repeated violations to her Constitutional rights, whether due to negligence or retaliation.”
Some may wonder why the BOP and the U.S. Attorneys’s office went out of their way to lock up someone who seemed to be making real rehabilitation. Maybe the Federal Bureau of Prisons was seeking additional appropriations that day tied to the number of those it keeps in custody? Maybe they view their jobs as locking up the most people for the longest period of time? Maybe failing to follow their own policy on drug tests and refusing to allow Defontes access to an attorney was a simple mistake? Whatever the justification, there are no clear or easy answers, which is symptomatic of the criminal justice as a whole.