Unbelievable...
Innocent man spent months in jail for bringing honey back to United States
By Lynh Bui August 23 at 7:00 AM
Leon Haughton likes honey in his tea. Which is why during his Christmas visit to relatives in Jamaica, he made his regular stop and bought three bottles from a favorite roadside stand before heading home to Maryland.
It was a routine purchase for him until he landed at the airport in Baltimore. Customs officers detained Haughton and police arrested him, accusing him of smuggling in not honey, but liquid meth.
Haughton spent nearly three months in jail before all charges were dropped and two rounds of law enforcement lab tests showed no controlled substances in the bottles.
By then, Haughton, who according to his lawyer had no criminal record, had lost both of his jobs as a cleaner and a construction worker.
“They messed up my life,” Haughton said. “I want the world to know that the system is not right. If I didn’t have strong people around me, they would probably leave me in jail. You’re lost in the system.”
Months after his release, he is only now fully rebuilding his life after the setback devastated him and his family of six children.
Haughton’s status as a legal permanent resident with a green card complicated his case. Because he was arrested at an airport for alleged drug felonies, his case triggered an federal detention order that extended his time in jail, court testimony shows.
Twenty days after his arrest, a state police lab test looking for drugs in the bottles came up negative. Yet the 45-year-old father sat behind bars for two more months total before the last of the charges were dropped after a second all-clear in a federal lab test.
“Someone dropped the ball somewhere,” Haughton’s lawyer Terry Morris said. “An innocent man spent 82 days in jail for bringing honey into the United States.”
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Haughton — facing at least 25 years in jail — appeared in court for a bail review two days after his arrest. A public defender at the hearing said Haughton had no prior convictions and had lived in the area for the past nine years. A judge agreed to let him go on work release, court files and recordings of the hearing show.
But more than three weeks later, Haughton was still behind bars.
The drug charges triggered detention orders from Customs officials, Haughton’s lawyer said. Although the Maryland State Police lab returned test results on the bottles that indicated “No CDS detected” on Jan. 17, and although prosecutors had dropped the three felony drug counts on Jan. 23, Haughton still was facing a misdemeanor charge for possession of a controlled dangerous substance, or CDS.
Haughton asked to be released on Jan. 24 at his second bail review, but Anne Arundel County District Court Judge Laura M. Robinson worried he would not appear for trial.
“The problem is I can’t let him go to ICE because he would be deported potentially,” Robinson said, according to a recording of the hearing. “Even if I released you, you still wouldn’t necessarily be released. You would go into federal detention.”
Haughton was sent back to jail, appearing in court for a third bail review Feb. 5.
Morris, Haughton’s lawyer, told the judge that Haughton should be released because the immigration detainer was triggered by the felony charges, which had been dropped. The federal government was in the middle of last winter’s shutdown, and Morris said he couldn’t reach anyone at Immigration and Customs Enforcement to lift the detainer.
“The thing that’s going to end up happening, and they’re going to realize it is, it’s just honey,” Morris said during the bail review. “He’s been in jail for 30 days for honey.”
Robinson said she would consider releasing Haughton on his own recognizance but only if the federal government pulled the detention order.
“The ICE detainer is really prohibitive,” Robinson said. “. . . I’m kind of up against it on the ICE detainer.”
Haughton went back to jail — again.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/innocent-man-spent-months-in-jail-for-bringing-honey-back-to-united-states/2019/08/22/6c5c538c-71c3-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html?wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
DO SOMETHING!
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