Marissa Alexander back in court but not in jail after violating home detention

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/marissa-alexander-court-home-detention

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Marissa Alexander, the Florida woman whose conviction and 20-year jail sentence for firing a warning shot at her abusive and violent husband were recently overturned, will not have to return to prison to await a new trial, a judge ruled on Friday.

Prosecutors wanted Alexander’s bail revoked because she took shopping trips with her family and ran other errands last month, violating the strict terms of home detention imposed upon her release in November.

“On nine separate days in a two-week period this defendant felt entitled to contravene explicit directions. How many chances before they’re not second chances?” assistant state attorney Richard Mantei told circuit court judge James Daniel at a bond hearing in Jacksonville.

Daniel, however, sided with Alexander’s lawyer, Bruce Zimet, who told the court each of the outside trips were approved by April Wilson, a corrections counsellor with the Jacksonville sheriff’s office, and that the violations were not wilful.

“We’re going back to square one,” Daniel said, ordering Alexander, 33, to stay at home until her second trial begins on 31 March, or risk immediate arrest.

“This is a situation that has occurred by mistake, simply that and nothing else. It is very clear nobody had discretion to allow Marissa Alexander to go on any errands, no matter how benign they may be. [But] I am satisfied [Alexander’s lawyers] didn’t know what was happening, found out after the state found out and appropriately went over to find out what was happening.”

Alexander was freed in November after 19 months in jail, when an appeals court ruled that the judge at her trial last year gave incorrect instructions to the jury regarding the burden of proof in self-defence cases. Alexander claimed she was in fear for her life during a beating from her husband, Rico Gray, at the couple’s home in August 2010, and retrieved her legally owned gun from a car in the garage before returning to the house and firing a single shot into the ceiling to stop him. Nobody was injured.

She was denied a hearing under Florida’s stand-your-ground law – which allows the use of guns for self-defence – and sent for trial. A six-person jury took just 12 minutes to convict her of three counts of assault with a deadly weapon, resulting in a mandatory 20-year sentence under Florida’s 10-20-life statute for certain gun crimes.

The appeal court ruling quashed the conviction and sentence in September, and Judge Daniel ordered a new trial for this spring. Since then, supporters of Alexander, who had given birth to a premature daughter nine days before the attack from Gray, insist she has been the subject of a vendetta by state attorney Angela Corey amounting to “a pattern of emotional and psychological abuse”.

“While we are relieved that Corey’s motion was denied, we must ask why is Angela Corey targeting rather than supporting Marissa Alexander, a victim of domestic violence?” Aleta Alton-Toure, the group’s spokesperson, said after Friday’s hearing. “Instead of being an ally to Alexander, the state continues to abuse her, including threatening to keep her from her children, minimising the violence she experienced, making false accusations, and suggesting that her life is not worth saving.

“Corey has taken advantage of every opportunity to undermine Alexander’s credibility and criminalise her character in an attempt to sway public opinion before Alexander’s new trial.”

In court on Friday, Mantei – who was part of Corey’s unsuccessful prosecution team last summer, during neighbourhood watch leader George Zimmerman’s murder trial for killing the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin – painted a different picture of Alexander. He insisted that her constant seeking of approval from Wilson to leave home on authorised trips were “disrespectful” of the court.

“The defendant took advantage of this counsellor,” he said. “The multiple requests and idea that someone could interpret this as licence to do what she felt like doing is in contravention of explicit directions. She clearly knows there are certain things she can’t do; she didn’t go out and get a gun, we hope. To walk in here and say, ‘I found someone who said I could do it,’ the behaviour is like someone who got their hand caught in the cookie jar.”

Alexander’s supporters have been fundraising to pay her mounting legal costs. Under the terms of her current bail, she must pay $105 a week for a GPS ankle monitor and a further $500 every second week to cover the costs of administering the bond.

A legal defence fund run through the website freemarissanow.org raised more than $22,000 by the end of last year and has set a further $30,000 target before the trial. The case, before Judge Daniel in Jacksonville, is expected to last at least two weeks.

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