Slashdot Mirror
Database Finds Fugitive After 35 Years
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian has a story on a woman who was claims she is innocent and was apprehended 35 years after escaping prison by a computer database created by the Department of Homeland Security. Linda Darby was convicted of killing her husband in 1970 and sentenced to life at an Indiana prison but escaped two years later by climbing over a barbed-wire fence at the Indiana Women's Prison. She knocked on a stranger's door in Indianapolis, telling the woman who answered that her cuts and scratches were from a fight with her boyfriend. In Indianapolis she met the man who would become her third husband and moved to his hometown of Pulaski, where they raised their two children and watched eight grandchildren grow up. As Linda Jo McElroy, she used a similar date of birth and social security number to her real ones which allowed a computer database created by the Department of Homeland Security to identify her. Darby says she is innocent and fled prison because she did not want to serve time for another person's crime."
There's an additional punishment for escaping prison?
Our law defines the attempt to escape (or succeeding) as following the basic human urge to be free, thus not punishable by law.
Of course, what happens is that any chance you had for parole is gone. But there's no additional punishment for breaking out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Escape, and attempted escape is a crime, at least in California, and can result in additional prison time. (I would be surprised if any state did not have similar laws). But of course if you were already in for life, you can't get additional time.
Dunno where he's from, but that applies to Sweden. Here you are usually given parole after 2/3 of the prison time (if you behaved well in prison etc), but of course fleeing removes that chance. It is however proposed by some politicians that it should be punishable.