Legal Research

California Woman Faces Prison Return 32 Years After Walking Away

By David Badertscher, PLL

Source: Crime and Justice News, May 1, 2008.

"With an executive for a husband, three grown daughters and spacious home in a community of million-dollar houses, Marie Walsh of San Diego was busted by the U.S. Marshals Service 32 years after she walked away from a Michigan prison, where she served one year of a 10-to-20-year sentence for selling heroin in 1974. Her arrest and pending extradition has awakened eternal questions about crime and punishment, says the San Diego Union- Tribune. 'This raises a much larger issue for a lot of us - the issue of redemption, and how do we achieve that?' said Larry Hinman, a University of San Diego philosophy professor and renowned ethicist."

"Walsh is really Susan Marie LeFevre; now she may have to serve nine more years in prison. 'Just because she escaped and evaded capture for 30 years doesn't mean your prison sentence sentence is negated,' said Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan. Walsh, 53, managed to hide her checkered past from her children and her husband, an executive at Waste Management. Gay Mason, who lives across the street, said, 'I don't think anyone feels that it would be useful to society to lock her up back in prison.' LeFevre's legal troubles date to 1974, when she sold about $200 worth of drugs to an undercover agent. She was 19. Michigan authorities called LeFevre a major drug trafficker who ran a heroin operation that earned about $2,000 a week. Her Southern California life began to unravel in late March, when the Michigan Department of Corrections received an anonymous phone call suggesting she might be in California."

San Diego Union-Tribune

Full post as published by New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library on May 01, 2008 (boomark / email).