Thursday, January 21, 2016
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
A sentencing memorandum by her attorney paints a bleak picture of a Maine woman who was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. Northern District Court of Ohio for supplying drugs to an inmate at the federal prison in Elkton in 2014.
The attorney for Kasey Crouse, 26, of Lewiston, Maine, wrote in his memorandum that his client has been taking heroin since she was 13 and has turned to prostitution since she was 15 to support her habit.
Crouse is accused of bringing suboxone strips May 23, 2014, to her husband, Albert Hewins, 31, also of Lewiston, Maine, while he was an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Elkton. She was sentenced by Judge Dan Aaron Polster to seven months in federal custody followed by seven months of electronically monitored house arrest after she pleaded guilty to a charge of providing contraband to an inmate.
Crouse’s Cleveland-based attorney, Joseph P. Morse, asked for a sentence of time served, which is about five months, plus intense substance-abuse treatment for his client.
Hewins has yet to be sentenced. In his sentencing memorandum, his attorney said that Hewins asked his wife to bring suboxone strips to him to ease his discomfort from his withdrawal from opiates. The memorandum said prison staff knew beforehand that Crouse may be delivering illegal drugs to Hewins, and after their visit he was searched and five suboxone strips were found on him.
Hewins’ memorandum said he was able to get some suboxone in prison, but he asked his wife to bring more because the suboxone he could get from other inmates was “expensive in the prison market.”
Because of his violation of the rules, Hewins was placed in a special unit where he ended up enduring the pain of opiate withdrawal, his memorandum said. He was serving a two-year sentence on a federal charge of being an unlawful user of illegal substances in possession of a firearm.
Crouse’s attorney asked for a sentence lighter than the federal guidelines, saying that probation reports note mental health and physical conditions as factors supporting a lighter sentence. Crouse has also admitted her guilt, and at the time she delivered the suboxone to her husband, she also was extremely poor, almost “penniless,” Morse wrote.