A New York prison tailor, Joyce Mitchell, has been charged with aiding a pair of convicted murderers in escaping from a Clinton County, New York, correctional facility. Specifically, Mitchell is charged with a “class D” felony count of promoting prison contraband and a misdemeanor charge of criminal facilitation. If convicted, she faces up to eight years behind bars.
This news has a lot of people asking: Why only eight years?
It’s a fair question, especially if the convicted killers kill again while on the run, a maximum sentence of eight years would seem light for someone who helped them escape prison.
The most serious charge is the Class D felony, promoting prison contraband. Article 205 of New York Penal law deals with escape and other offenses related to custody. A felony is always a serious charge, with collateral consequences if convicted. Still, Class D felonies in New York are relatively low on the felony continuum. In fact, first-degree promotion of prison contraband, despite the high risk of harm to others in this case, is not even classified as a “violent felony” offense for sentencing.
So here’s the thing: Joyce Mitchell is a likely candidate for a plea bargain. This case has “early disposition” written all over it. Why?
First, it’s been reported she’s been “cooperative” with authorities. That means she is answering questions and giving statements. Even without knowing what is contained in those statements, the kind of interviews that lead law enforcement to publicly ordain a suspect “cooperative” means that she has likely confessed. Confessions, if freely and voluntarily given, will limit your defense options drastically at trial.
Second, she’s the kind of defendant who doesn’t go to trial. That’s not meant to be disparaging. Most people don’t have the stomach to gamble on a criminal trial. The statistics speak for themselves: More than 90% of defendants plead guilty rather than go to trial.
Think about it — would you risk more than double your sentence for a shot at a “not guilty”? Forget Texas Hold ‘Em. Taking your criminal case to trial (especially in federal court) is the ultimate high-stakes, no-limit poker game. Most people would rather hang out in the low-risk, penny slot machine area of plea-bargaining. That includes defendants such as Mitchell.
For one thing, she may have a lot to lose — such as spending eight years in prison. Plus, she has a respect for authority that battle-hardened recidivist defendants don’t have.
Defendants like Mitchell usually look for an out, and early on. They are a law enforcement dream, because they cave quickly and offer plenty of information during interrogations — or, as law enforcement prefers to call them — “interviews.”
But if Mitchell were to go on trial, would she have any defenses?
For now, focusing only on the felony contraband count and recognizing that we still don’t know the details about the contraband, there might actually be a creative defense or two.
Under New York law, a person is guilty of promoting prison contraband in the first degree when she knowingly and unlawfully introduces any dangerous contraband into a detention facility. It’s in the definitions that a potential defense lies.
“Dangerous contraband” means contraband that is capable of endangering the safety or security of a detention facility. It doesn’t matter if the item is actually used for endangerment. A saw blade, for example, is capable of endangering someone’s safety. It also endangered the security because it was used in the escape.
But what about the word “introduce”? It’s not defined in the jury instructions. Clinton County Correctional Facility offers both industrial and vocational training.
What if the saw blade was already inside the prison for a lawful reason, say, in a shop or in the maintenance room? Can someone “introduce” “into” a facility a thing that is already in the facility? Or, would a court conclude that causing a saw blade to move from within a facility to another part of the facility is “introducing” it into the facility?
The jury instruction as written reads like the TSA rule that says we can’t “introduce” a bottle of water past security checkpoints and into the airport terminal facilities. But once we are inside, we can buy a bottle of water and take it anywhere we like within the terminal. Surely, moving items between areas of a prison is against rules and policy, but it doesn’t really seem to be prohibited in the jury instructions.
Then there’s the word “unlawfully.” A person “unlawfully” introduces dangerous contraband into a detention facility when that person has no legal right to do so. By way of example, a prison tailor might lawfully be among the few permitted to bring a pair of scissors into a prison. It’s what she does with them within the prison that is problematic (like if she gave them to an inmate). But the jury instructions are silent on what happens with these items if they were initially lawfully brought into or are already within the facility walls.
If this defendant smuggled in, for example, an oscillating spindle sander and a hypoid saw, and wasn’t authorized to do so as a tailor, then she’s got problems. But if there was a saw blade in the prison shop that she had lawful access to, and she simply facilitated the movement of the saw from one area of the facility to another, then what? Applying the language of the jury instructions, did she “unlawfully” “introduce” contraband “into” the facility? Does this activity meet the definition beyond a reasonable doubt?
Depending on the facts that emerge, if the saw blades and other “contraband” were already lawfully within the facility, a defense attorney could potentially use the jury instructions to raise some reasonable doubt.
Farfetched? Admittedly, yes.
Perhaps there’s even a New York court out there that has addressed this defense already and shot it down. But that’s what defense attorneys are obligated to do — challenge each and every element of the prosecution’s case and the language of the law enacted by the legislature.
Defending a criminal case at trial requires creativity, assuming the client can handle going to trial in the first place.
Read CNNOpinion’s Flipboard magazine.