Posted on 12/10/2010 8:36:16 PM PST by devane617
Freedom tasted like China Wok takeout at the Baker home Friday night.
Shrimp fried rice, ribs, fried chicken, canned soda. It was the first meal that Monique Baker, 50, shared with her family after two decades behind bars.
The family joined hands. Baker led them in prayer before they sat down to eat.
Baker had skipped lunch at the Hillsborough Correctional Institution earlier that day. She was determined that a breakfast of toast and a few spoonfuls of grits would be her last meal as a prisoner.
The afternoon before, her sentence of 35 years was undone at a session of the Florida Board of Executive Clemency. Baker was sentenced in 1990 on charges of drug trafficking. With gain time, she was to be released in 2017.
At home Friday night, Baker asked her brother Jay to please pass the hot sauce. Everything was a focus of fascination, including the table china.
"I am eating with a fork, not a spork," Baker observed, child-like, at the family dining table.
Her father asked: "What's a spork?"
*
Earlier that evening, Baker looked to the sky as she stepped through the prison door with her parents.
"It's nighttime and I'm outside with the stars and that's something we don't do in prison," Baker told a gathering of reporters who were waiting for her release. "Freedom is a beautiful thing."
Her parents, friends and Rep. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, pleaded with the clemency board to release Baker early. They said she fell into a bad crowd as drugs seized control of her life when she was young.
She spent her time in four state prisons: Lowell, Jefferson, Broward and, since May, Hillsborough. Baker had been a model inmate, honing her skills as a paralegal and teaching other inmates. In Hillsborough, she was editor of a newspaper.
The clemency board voted unanimously to commute her sentence.
It was a long way from 1990, when Baker was convicted of smuggling $395,000 worth of cocaine from Fort Lauderdale in a rented stretch limousine. At the time, police said Baker, 29, got the idea of using a limo from an episode of Miami Vice. ABC's Primetime Live featured the case, using it "to show the tremendous amount of time and money that goes into prosecuting one person in the war on drugs," the St. Petersburg Times wrote then.
Now, Baker told the group of reporters outside the jail, all she wanted was to go home and take a hot bath. She also was looking forward to a meal and surfing the Internet — something she didn't have access to while in prison.
"That's something I can't wait to get on," she said.
With her freedom, Baker said she plans to help people in situations similar to hers. She and her parents thanked the clemency board, Gov. Charlie Crist and Rouson.
"I just want to say, Gov. Crist, I'm going to make you proud," Baker said.
Baker said that while in prison, she was only allowed to hug her mother for short periods at the start and end of visits. Now that she's out, the hugs can be longer.
"It's nice to be able to hug her and not be able to stop," she said.
*
She arrived at her childhood home on Kingston Street in Child's Park just before 8 p.m. Again, she peered at the stars in the night sky before stepping through the door.
The last time she was in her home, Robert Ulrich was mayor of St. Petersburg and George H.W. Bush was the president.
Back then, the front of the house was a screened-in porch. Her father has since converted it into a living room.
But some things had not changed.
Her Gibbs High School graduation photo from 1977 still hung on the wall.
Nobody forces that cocaine up people’s noses. Locking someone up for 20 years for intending to sell something that people are willing to buy to use on themselves is BS. And the violence associated with the drug trade wouldn’t be an issue if it was legal in the first place...
As an aside, I was acting pro se this week and found out that some leos do lie, some judges do not decide the case based upon the facts, and that failure to comply with a motion for discover results in absolutely nothing. The PA tho, was respectful, young,blonde, TALL, beautiful, but I would not trust her as far as I could throw her. My feelings for the legal system have only been reinforced.
Well, I have an addict living in my house now. She’s been clean for over a year now but it’s been a difficult year for her... and us.
You do realize that ‘crack’ is a product of the War on Drugs, don’t you? As with all such things, when the penalties for possession of minor amounts of cocaine became so stringent, dealers decided to develop something that would give more “bang” for the volume. That way they could transport the equivalent of a kilo of coke in the form of a few grams of ‘crack’. Smaller volumes meant less risk of detection and more $$$ per trip.
Nearly the same thing happened during the prohibition years. Prior to Prohibition, most people drank wine or beer because both of them could be made in a cool basement. When the penalties for doing so became worse, it became more economical to distill whiskey, thus giving more kick for the volume and more profit for the risk. I may have been young then but I still remember my dad buying fruit jars of white lightning and burying them in the garden so they wouldn’t be found... except by us kids.
Not quite possession as you noted.
“To compare it to alcohol is nuts.”
How true. I’ve done both in my younger years, and there is no comparison. Two beers vs. two hits of acid? What a joke. Ask any loving parent if they would rather give their child (if they were forced to) two drinks or two hits of acid, coke, etc., and see what they say.
And the money angle has no merit. If someone’s using a drug, it’s for the “high” — who cares if the dealer made big or little profit? Just want to get stoned. Easy legal access to drugs—coke, meth, pot, acid—would be a total nightmare for this country.
Other countries are wiser and realize this. Their drug laws are much stricter.
“If I had spent that much time in prison I couldn?t imagine wanting to set foot inside of a building, other than perhaps to sleep, for at least a few months.”
Having been a PO, I have spoken to many people that have been in prison for 1-27 years. Its sensory overload. Many have to sleep on the floor for awhile because a bed is too soft.
That said, Florida probably spent $395,000 housing her and she never hurt a flea.
“Also, was she transfered from prison to prison for the same crime or was this for different crimes? If for the same, then what caused so many moves? There’s something missing in this story”
Noone serves all their time at one prison.
“Two beers vs. two hits of acid? What a joke.”
Never heard of anyone addicted to acid. Ever heard of anyone addicted to alcohol? Ie- alcoholic?
Yes, many do. Retired prison guard family here.
Its about numbers and classification. I’ve talked to very few that have stayed in one place unless they did a year and a day. Even then, women end up in Lowell and then are moved to other prisons. Males often end up in work camps the last 6 months or a year before release.
Major drug dealers should be executed. It’s costing nearly $50,000 per year to warehouse these “people.”
yes, we need stricter laws on these people
Don’t kid yourself. Druggies like drugs. Like getting high. Whatever they have that day...pot, speed, acid, etc. It’s all about getting high. The addiction is to the high.
Like I said, in earlier years I did a lot of drugs and alcohol. So, sorry, you’re trying to convince the wrong person. I’ve lived it.
” So, sorry, you?re trying to convince the wrong person. I?ve lived it.”
LOL... No comment..
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